Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself - <AUTHOR> https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ <comment><USER3> > I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, > but there were no metrics that tracked developer time.

For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while.

The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points they must distribute to people who help them the most.

While I don't love the idea of gamifying it, all the places I've ever worked have had too strong of a reverse incentive towards individual achievement, especially when it comes to promotion, and not nearly enough support for teamwork in specific and measurable ways.

Anybody have experience with teamwork metrics like this, or others that worked or didn't work?

<comment><USER4> I worked in a remote team once helping a company in Seattle (that perhaps had a bit of a jock culture problem). I could be stuck for days because following the README in a repo just wasn't enough to get the project to compile and run. Every standup I was telling "I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing.". To be sure to repeat a message like that every four hours in channels like Slack.

Managers read it, my teammates in Seattle read it. Nobody ever helped us (because you know pair programming is so much more efficient if you can have two programmers blocked when you could just have one staring out of the window and typing "help" to invisible people). If at all I would be unblocked after a few days usually the problems was some kind of unguessable piece of configuration that should have been part of the README and/or code, a problem completely unsolvable without knowing what to do. Only then I could continue doing a minor change like updating a CSS file for the next Safari or IE quirk, usually just 5 minutes of work.

Apparently helping remote teammates to get unstuck in their work just wasn't an interesting performance metric.

Until this day I still can't believe that everybody was just throwing tens of thousands of dollars of work out the window because helping stuck teammates wasn't counting towards some kind of bonus.

<comment><USER5> On the one hand it is indeed disappointing that nobody would help you with this. On the other hand, there's a more pro-active role you could have played yourself in this as well. "When everybody is responsible, nobody is" \- what often helps is specifically asking people, by name, to sit down with you for a bit and help you get through it.

In fact, there are many social group situations in which asking specific people is far more effective than asking questions "to the group".

<comment><USER6> If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned, or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to management. If only it were someone's job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if there is some small action that would help them.

Nah, let's just alternate between micromanaging and being totally absent; fret about lack of productivity or lack of progress; maybe institute a daily stand- up.

<comment><USER7> Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

Source: am a manager.

<comment><USER8> One of your jobs as a manager is to debug these people issues, right? So when you get a "bug report" like "I'm stuck", you should investigate the bug and look for a solution, which might be something like "Hey Bob, Jim is having trouble getting the Frobnicator running on his machine. Can you please give him a hand with this later today? Thanks". (This assumes that Jim's SOS was issued in the first half of the day; want to make sure the issue gets resolved promptly while also not interrupting Bob's own productivity/flow.)

<comment><USER7> Yes that's true, which is why I said "why not both?" The manager should do more, but so should the employee. Sitting there and saying "I'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage compared to saying "I'm blocked. Can you please help me Mr/Ms XYZ?"

<comment><USER9> > _What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can 't > help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves._

> _Source: am a manager._

> _I 'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage_

As a manager, are you prepared to put your real name to these comments?

<comment><USER10> > As a manager, are you prepared to put your real name to these comments?

This is an anonymous public forum with a massive audience and great content. Let's keep it civil and not target individuals. Please don't try and start witch hunts to ruin someone's career just because you do not agree with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To author: you lost the political game.

I busted my ass at a startup for years and also lost the political game. So I'm speaking from experience here.

You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to change. Or figure out how to play. I'd like to think there are places with better politics but I think it's pretty endemic of large organizations. I'd love to be proven wrong.

The thing is, "working for yourself" is so flawed in so many ways. In the first place, nobody "works for themself". You might work for customers, or clients, or whatever, but not "yourself". Second, you're a lot better off working at a good company -- MUCH better off -- unless you have a pretty damn concrete idea of what you're doing. In addition to the income, the big company will provide better networking, more credibility for _anything_ you do subsequently (whether a new job, fundraising, hiring--ANYTHING), it's an all- around better gig.

I'm just trying to save you a lot of wasted years and time here. Take it or leave it.

<comment><USER12> As a junior engineer, what the best way to learn about and master the political game? I feel like it all goes way over my head. Does anyone have any recommended reading?

<comment><USER13> I think the author said it in the article: Optimize for promotion. Work from day 1 to game the metrics. If it helps your metrics, do it, if it doesn't approach with caution.

If you start that from day 1 you'd be 2 years ahead of the author.

Honestly, it sounds like a _really_ shitty way to live. I personally prefer doing great work and having faith that it will work out.

It has, a lot slower than that, but I'm proud of the work I've done and enjoy my work daily.

<comment><USER14> There's another position that's similar but less gross, which is to have some humility about what you think is important vs. what work your manager/manager's manager think is important. Try to work on what they think is important not (just) because of a cynical desire to game the system and get ahead, but because they have probably more experience and (often a _lot_ more) context than you do.

Of course, this only works if you have managers you feel like you can trust and respect in the first place.

<comment><USER15> That's definitely true too. There's a lot of developers who spend way more time beautifying code than they actually do driving the business. While sometimes great code leads to great business results, that's not a law of nature. The inverse and converse can certainly be true too.

<comment><USER16> Spot on. Most organizations spend time on how to do thinks than actually doing it. What i found out was to get some data as soon as possible, even if it has large caveats. That is more important than getting it right, becaude you wont.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article really resonated with me, as it's eerily similar to my own experience at Microsoft a couple of years back. Constant reorgs, resulting in projects being cancelled, resulting in lack of motivation, as months of your hard work are thrown out due to unclear decisions by the management.

I too was hoping for a senior level promotion. The last project I worked on, I was the only non-senior level developer in a team of 5. I went out of my way to ensure we released a well designed, built and tested system on time. At times I felt like I was committing more to the project than any of my more senior comrades. Come release time, I even saw one of the design decisions I had insisted on save us from down-time. All of this I was sure would lead me to the desired promotion.

Come performance review time, I was rated at the top performance tier, as I had the past couple of years. Unfortunately however, I was informed not enough time had passed since my last level increase, but I was sure to get it if I kept it up for another 1-2 years.

It's hard to describe the feeling of defeat I felt at that point. I resigned and left within the next few months. What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to those had with your cable provider.

<comment><USER18> > What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your > managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for > a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. > Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to > those had with your cable provider.

Wow, that's one hell of a way to look at things. Thanks for that perspective.

<comment><USER19> Both are businesses, and most successful businesses are sociopathic. That includes game theory both with customers and internal resources. You are a "human resource", not a friend.

<comment><USER20> This is where I think academia has got it right. When you do something, you get full credit on it -- your name on the paper, your face on the book and department website, you're the one giving the presentation, you're the one who gets the benefits if it's commercialized (after the university takes its cut). Loyalty also is valued (or a less negative word to use is being a team player), as people write recommendation letters for each other and their reputation is at stake when they do anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. I don't disagree with the promotion committee on that front.

IIRC, Senior Software Engineer is a terminal level. You aren't expected to advance any more once you reach that level. Some do, but you can stay a Senior Engineer for the rest of your career and that's fine.

So certainly "can fix bugs and write docs and tests" isn't sufficient for that promotion. A junior engineer and a manager who is at least partially paying attention can get that done.

I also don't really disagree with the evaluation that 6 months of Senior level work isn't enough for a promotion, especially if nothing actually shipped.

I get that constant reorgs are frustrating. That alone is enough of a reason to not work at Google or another BigCo. That's the real problem here.

<comment><USER22> At many organizations, Senior Engineer is not the end of the IC track, not even close. For example:

... > Senior Engr. > Staff Engr. > Sr. Staff Engr. > Principal Engr. > Sr. Principal Engr. > Distinguished Engr.

<comment><USER23> "terminal level", in the sense being used by the OP, doesn't mean "end of the IC track". It means a level that you can be at "forever". Often times the junior engineering levels have some expectations around eventually being promoted (ie, "up or out").

<comment><USER24> IIRC, at Google the levels below Senior Engineer require progress toward a higher level as a job requirement. So that even if you're performing well at that level, if you aren't showing progress it gets counted against you in perf increasingly until eventually you are at risk of being pushed out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This covers a lot of the same ground as Brendan Reid's "Stealing the Corner Office"[1], which gives a playbook for helping stuff like this work in your favour, rather than against you.

You fit the profile of what Reid calls the "Smart but Stationary Manager" \- a guy who is a lot smarter than a lot of the people who do get promoted, but who doesn't optimize for the right factors. Reid's point is that a lot of these guys get habitually overlooked as they optimize for the success of the company, rather than themselves, and assume they will be evaluated on their work alone.

The idea that when you go to work, you are there first and foremost to work on your own career development (rather than the goals of the company) crops up again and again. Even in failing companies, you see people make spectactular career gains.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Corner-Office- Strategies-B...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Corner-Office-Strategies- Business/dp/1601633203)

<comment><USER26> I guess my question is: Can you get job satisfaction from promotion-focused work? I'm proud of what _I 've done_. When I make someone else's life easier, that makes me feel good/satisfied with my work. I can't fathom satisfaction from impressing a promotion committee and tacking on a bigger title.

<comment><USER27> The general idea is that the things that would impress a promotion committee are things that you have done, that are good for the company.

That, of course, is not the truth everywhere, but anecdotally it's a lot truer than most people complaining about other people sucking up thinks it is.

<comment><USER28> How come fixing bugs to make data pipeline more robust and data more accurate does not fall under "things that are good for the company"?

<comment><USER27> The point is that it's on you to articulate the value of what you're doing. Some activities are "batteries included" when it comes to metrics, but a great many aren't.

If fixing bugs in the data pipeline is indeed valuable to the company, you can explain to the promotion panel how (after all, you convinced yourself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> <holds envelope to forehead> Because you made enough money that it was an affordable risk?

Yes, perf is garbage and management is chaos, but let's be honest with ourselves. Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody.

"Devoted employee" followed by "expert at gaming the perf system" followed by "project cancelled and adrift" is, sadly, the normal progression for a Googler, from what I've seen.

<comment><USER16> "Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody."

No. Not even close. There's a reason it's called golden handcuffs. It all depends on where you are in life. If you have a mortgage, it won't be enough depending on the house you have. If you don't have a house, you will have a lot of FOMO. Big time.

It's all about pscyhology - you need exactly 0$ if you are dedicated and don't have dependencies. Ok, let's say just couple thousand for a room and food.

<comment><USER29> I thought "oughta be enough for anybody" was an obvious "640KB" joke, but maybe I'm just old. Anyway, it certainly is enough money to appropriately cushion an attempt at freelancing.

And the best thing to do after leaving a job at Google is to move somewhere cheaper!

<comment><USER21> > "640KB"

"$640K in GSU over 4 years ought o be enough for anybody"

That's actually the ballpark for a senior engineer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm also a Googler. Upon joining I was also given the keys to an ancient data pipeline, due a redesign for at least five years at that time. The person handing me the keys left almost immediately. My task was also keeping the thing adrift and nursing it back to health, whatever it takes. I _did_ get promoted for that. The metric I used was pretty much the amount of developer time that went into supporting it that was saved by my damn ugly hacks. It was collected by asking nicely for the affected folk to confirm their lives got better.

I can't say why it worked only for one of us.

<comment><USER31> Were you going from junior (L3) to intermediate (L4)? If you were, then the task you described seems appropriate - you don't have to do much to go from L3 to L4.

The author of the blog post was going for senior (L5), which you can't get just by maintaining code.

<comment><USER30> Right, that's probably the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm glad you put in the work to write down your experiences, and I'm glad that HN is rewarding this.

Promotion at Google is a process filled with selfishness and dishonesty and I think hackers need to know about this. The promotion committees are a joke. They typically have no idea about your product, your team, your quality of contribution and whether what you're telling them in the promo package is true or a lie.

The way promotion works at Google is actually a direct consequence of their desire to "empower" the engineers and keep managers in a rather passive, supervisory role. The assumption behind it (completely misguided IMO) is that engineers will "figure it out" on their own and "handle things among themselves" just fine.

The big problem with this is that it strongly incentivizes the kind of anti- social behavior that's normally associated with Wall Street: dishonesty, short-term thinking, greed, narcissism.

 _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._

That's exactly right. Manipulating your coworkers to your own advantage is the fastest route to promotion at Google. Lying about your contribution to things would be the runner-up. This is simply because there's a lack of authorities who could see, recognize and penalize such behavior.

I never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management model where your boss would handle things.

I know I may be the exception but I actually value having a boss who's got things under control and looks after the team, as opposed to a lord-of-the- flies type situation where the promotion goes to the biggest liars and manipulators.

Source: I worked at Google as a SWE

<comment><USER33> I used to believe that middle managers were useless shits who wasted my time and got in the way of work. I imagined that the flat organizational model made more sense: since this is what my day to day life is, anyway, at least we get rid of idiots who get paid more than me.

Then I worked in a place where I had actually good middle management. They were smart and capable. They supported our team and helped us succeed. They shielded us from most of the political BS. They advocated for us to other elements of the business. They invested, both time and money, in our professional development.

To make it concrete: in a company where the other engineering teams (five or six of them) were consistently experiencing churn, having morale problems, and shipping buggy code six months late, our team had zero turnover, a shrinking bug backlog, and consistently delivered things _ahead_ of schedule.

I'm 100% on board with the good old proven management model now. You just need to have an actually good manager.

<comment><USER34> The problem is that management is basically an art and no one knows how to create consistently good managers. Because it's the epitomy of soft, unmeasurable, skills.

So when people get frustrated with shitty management, they turn to whatever other idea,.

If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware (or any other classic SWE management book that's highly regarded) we'd all be better off. But instead we're stuck in this equilibrium where we constantly chase management trends (see: open offices which are consistently shown to be nefarious for productivity).

<comment><USER35> > If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware

Lol, I feel like that's too much to ask. I'd be happy with management that actually read Brooks instead of just pretending like they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> After 15 years of doing this my theory on corporate promotions is simple: you need an executive sponsor.

VPs don't know who you are by default, they have too many reports. And if you're assigned unsexy work like keeping the trains running, well the better you do your job ironically the more you become like wallpaper.

I'm not saying you have to be a kissa*, although that does work at a remarkable number of companies, I'm saying you have to make yourself known to a person with power. Otherwise you're just a name and easy to reject.

You want to believe in meritocracy but in my experience the correlation between effectiveness and promotions is weak to nonexistent. If you want to get promoted -- besides doing a good job (and sometimes not even then) -- the reality is you probably have to market yourself upwards.

The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? I'm guessing a lot of it is how they 'feel' about someone.

But these days as a developer the sad reality is you probably need to switch jobs every 3-5 years if you want to keep moving upwards, unless you're really lucky.

<comment><USER37> > The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do > committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics?

The answer, from what I gather, is yes. The hiring / promotion committees are essentially an anonymous collection of fellow engineers, perhaps a step higher than you, but somewhat random in composition. As such, there is no reliable way to grease hands or build meaningful relationships with the wide range of people who might be on your committee.

The larger problem OP faces is simple: his senior engineer projects are not being protected by his manager. And possibly sabotaged indirectly by executives above. In that sense, he does need an executive sponsor, simply to protect the project assignments he needs to build his stone cold anonymous metrics case.

<comment><USER36> You can't befriend everybody, true, which is why you should identify one senior executive you think can help and market yourself to him or her (again, I wish it didn't work this way, but it seems to).

You only need that person's recommendation, not that of 15 random fellow engineers.

Besides, your data 'proving' your value likely has no context or comparable benchmarks, after 30 seconds of numbers it's straight to your soft skills.

But yes, agree with your second point that it's up to the manager to protect his projects or champion his employees.

<comment><USER37> Anywhere else, yea, but at Google specifically, not an option. Executives don't override the committee, except maybe Larry and Sergey. And if your advice is 'be friends with the CEO', I'm sure that'll scale right up.

The good news is that, based on reports from Googlers here, it sounds like the system is changing for the lower promotion tiers.

<comment><USER36> How did 'a senior executive' become the CEO? Obviously absurd and clearly not what I wrote.

It's not about 'overriding' the committee, it's about having a champion on the inside.

You seem to believe there's no human element to this process. It's all number crunching -- like they're picking stocks with a good P/E ratio.

But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair.

<comment><USER37> I didn't say the committee was numerical, though their reputation is such. OP's challenge is that Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts who you'll likely never have met, because the company is 100k engineers, and working on your small corner of Maps or whatever makes it unlikely you'll have ample opportunity to meet people from Security, or Search or Adwords or Adsense or Golang or Youtube or Nest or any of the myriad of other products besides yours from which the promotion panel is randomly pulled. You're essentially suggesting that to go from say Software Development Engineer 2 to Senior Software Development Engineer, you need to simply schmooze a few thousand coworkers.

> But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of > that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like > 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer, not into management. I don't know panels discuss, but given the odds are that nobody on the panel knows anything about you other than whats in the committee packet, it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

> If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be > more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was > unfair.

I'm not sure about that. My reading is that the OP left because the committee was saw themselves as numerical, but ended up being pathologically and myopically so. The metrics they see are the ones that can be calculated, often easily. Getting dinged for finding more bugs than you fixed in legacy software, when they mistake known bug counts for actual bug counts. Treating unquantifiable results like unreleased software as invalid. Ignoring necessary but difficult results to quantify like interviewing candidates, documenting code, and writing test suites.

Such a pathology can't be solved by knowing the right people, especially not when the system is designed to prevent this exact technique. The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee, it was the one(s) reassigning his team projects every quarter. Or barring that, one at another company.

<comment><USER36> > Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals > except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts

At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

This just comes from my personal experience working at large companies. It's also true of just getting something done: usually the most efficient way is contacting a VP (or relevant executive) who can move things. I've wasted years of my life trying to wade through bureaucracy.

> Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level > engineer, not into management.

You don't need to be in management for your people skills to matter. If you're a senior engineer / team lead / whatever, you're seen as authority, an expert, someone consulted for wisdom. If you're hostile or rude it reflects badly on the company, hence these committees look at your people skills.

> it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

I can't speak for Google explicitly but I can say your soft skills are always considered. Always. They consider them when they hire you and most places absolutely place a premium on them when promoting.

It's one of the reasons the requirements for promotions are so ill-defined everywhere. It's not just a concrete list of achievements, it's how your coworkers and manager view your personality.

> but ended up being pathologically and myopically

Yep -- politics. That's unfortunately how it works. You can assume it was an aberrant anomaly, in my experience politics rules the roost when promotions are being doled out.

> The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee

The senior executive wouldn't be on the committee, he or she would put in a good word for you.

Look, you don't have to take my word for it. If you know any senior HR people at your company or other companies, ask them how promotions are handled. It won't be uniform but I'm guessing politics, reputation and soft skills are most of the time (unfortunately) going to outweigh programming metrics.

/my two cents

<comment><USER37> > At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they > make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

Like, half of OP's blog post is about how Google specifically is not most of the companies you've worked for. Your advice would be useful virtually anywhere else, and were the subject anywhere else I would likely agree. However, in this specific case, "Look kids, this is just how the business world works" is poor advice and treats industry as homogeneous, despite your statement to the contrary.

Google's insanely profitable market position allows them to be wronger for longer on many things, ranging from server design to management practices. There was a time in which Larry Page fired all project managers, and I've seen no accounts saying 'This was a triumph -- huge success.' So if the rest of society has converged on a solution where management should be in charge of level promotions, this doesn't mean Google has adopted this (likely efficient) method.

Which is the point of this article: a warning to those that would fill his empty seat, that social norms, rules and processes are vastly different than you expect, and may persist despite not working in anyone's favor.

<comment><USER36> It's certainly possible politics and soft skills don't play prominent roles in promotions at Google -- I've never worked there.

But no matter how much of unicorn they are I'm guessing human nature still applies. I think the OP will see that Google, despite its attempts at meritocracy, is probably a lot like other places in that you have to market yourself upwards, and probably to someone who can help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is why people change companies every two years. It's easier to get a promotion by studying for interviews on leetcode than by spending the extra time promo gaming in one's career.

"Facebook will give me a sr software engineer position after 5 hours of interviews, here is that offer letter" is a very strong position. Market dynamics are a lot faster than internal promo dynamics at bigco.

Once you reach sr although, you usually have to go through the promo game from what I can see. Most companies do not hire staff engineers unless your already staff engineer somewhere else at another bigco. This is why people tend to become manager after this point, because you see its more effort to become a staff engineer than it is to become a 'sr manager', which is about equivalent to a staff engineer. People also become a manager for the learning experience. Understanding 'the other side' can be quite enlightening.

<comment><USER39> So I just checked out leetcode... it's supposed to be for juniors or undergrads, I assume? The hardest problems on there seem pretty trivial, especially when compared to the problems on projecteuler.

<comment><USER40> well you should have no problem getting into Google then

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Google is changing the promotion process such that managers have much more power (for all promotions up to level 5 == senior swe).

Previously it used to be, as Michael says, very much in the hands of the committee members who never heard about you or even your team.

Now the committee will be composed of your manager and some other two managers from a related team. The committee will not see your own promotion rationale or your own description of your projects and achievements, rather it will be the job of your manager to present these points and advocate on your behalf. The committee (except for your manager) will also see only limited peer feedback compared to before -- no free form text, only multiple choice questions/answers.

If all three managers agree that you meet the bar, you get promoted.

<comment><USER42> my co is moving from managers to anon committee, because it gives managers too much unchecked power to favor/punish. the wheel goes round.

<comment><USER43> I would trust my manager to not abuse that power. If he would start using it, I'd first try to change team or, if not possible, just change employer. Hopefully, for the sake of the organisation, people quitting would reflect badly on the manager over time.

The point being, it's much easier for me to manage the relationship with my manager than with some anonymous committee that doesn't even know me. The manager is already important enough that I would not keep him if he seemed more interested in personal agendas than his subordinates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I can understand author's motives very well.

I also started off in a corporation, it wasn't google but it was a large organization where politics played a major role in one's carreer. I had a very good friend, an architect who worked there for over 10 years, he was excellent in corporate politics and taught me a whole lot about it. The bottom line is that unless you have metrics to back up your claims (whatever they are), your claims mean nothing. Unfortunately, corporate culture encourages this kind of selfish attitude, where in order to get promoted you have to lick asses heavily, and the rest is just a background noise, even your performance. If you know the right people and if you have a good realtionship with them (also, if you are 'famous' within the company), then you will almost certainly succeed. This is how it works, almost everywhere, not just corporate environments.

It may appear that the author recklessly quit Google without having another job or even idea for a business, and I did the same thing, I had to leave, because I simply couldn't bear the fact that I was doing better (this, obviously, is subjective) than people 2-3 levels above and my promotion was put on hold just because there were corporate rules that forbid promoting employees that have been already promoted once within 2 years time period. When I informed my manager that I am leaving, he almost panicked, as he did not see that coming and they heavily relied on my experience and skills. They offered me a promotion and over 90% raise but I simply did not care anymore, I could not work there any longer. I also quit without having another job on the horizon. As a consequence my depression and insomnia almost disappeared, I am less nervous and feel generally a lot better. Do not judge the author for leaving Google, he did the right thing for himself, even though it exposes him to a serious risk.

<comment><USER45> > They offered me a promotion and over 90% raise but I simply did not care > anymore

What this should tell you is that they indeed could have easily promoted you and given you a raise but deliberately chose not to because they bet you'd work for below market. Only when they realized they were wrong did they suddenly admit they could treat you fairly. You made the right decision clearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> You're describing knowledge work at many companies.

You've also recognized why upper management, particularly execs, are more likely to be sociopaths (or at the very least, admittedly selfish).

And fortunately you've come to understand that being the boss/owner is the best way to make your hard work actually pay you accordingly. The downside to being your own boss is that your work ethic and motivation may drive you to work every waking hour. This is bad, and I hope you learn balance.

I don't think there's a solution to the problems you described - at least not a solution that includes staying in a company and working for someone else. There are people who are happy to stay mid-level and just churn out work for pay. Sometimes they play for the team, and sometimes they're a little selfish. But most importantly, they are satisfied or complacent. Others, like you, are neither.

Cheers and good luck!

<comment><USER47> Happy to see this post because reading the thread I was poised to say much the same thing.

I would add that people here may tend to have the kind of personality where they naturally assume that : if you are helpful to other people they will be helpful back; being helpful to other people is a rewarding thing in itself; if you are a good person you should be rewarded.

If this sounds like you (anyone reading, not the parent) I feel it is worthwhile pointing out that not all humans are like this. In fact most aren't. Surprisingly (it took me many decades and about 20 psychology books so...ymmv) it can be very difficult to realize this, if you have this sort of trusting personality type. fwiw I'm talking about the subconscious parts of the brain, so whatever you think you think, and whatever you hear other people saying...that's not really relevant. We are all Chimpanzees throwing feces inside.

<comment><USER48> Could you recommend us some of the most impactful psychology books you read on the subject?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the > organization.

That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work hours from them (possibly at the expense of family or personal time).

There is a second level of unspoken rules - "it really is about business and internal politics". You are supposed to discover and navigate a set of unwritten rules. And these usually don't get spelled out for you, because they are kind of ugly and often diametrically opposed the official rules from the first level.

Slavoj Zizek likes to talk about this when he talks about institutional ideology and how there are rules and meta rules. The meta rules dictate how you relate to the official rules. Which ones you are supposed to break to get ahead, for instance. The other side is that you are given permission to do something but you are not really allowed to take advantage of that or you get in trouble. For example the whole "take any vacation time you want, we don't have fixed days". But you are expected to not really take more than a few or you'll be laid off eventually.

Here is an excerpt where he talk a bit about that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs) (warning, he likes to use gross jokes and you might find his style unpalatable)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing that. That describes feelings I had working there. I think the idea of rules and meta-rules is a good way of explaining it.

<comment><USER50> The promotion process at google self-selects for a very important skill: you are given a certain goal and you find the optimal way to achieve it, regardless of whether you agree with it or not.

This is a crucial skill for middle managers. Their role is often making sure their team executes on executive vision without questioning the vision (imagine how messy things would become if each middle manager would start questioning executive strategy and push back on projects).

At the end, Google process worked as they designed it for. People like you, who don't like to just do what they are told to do, choose to move on. And people who accept it get promoted and go on to become effective middle managers from a Google executive standpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> As I've progressed from job to job (and everything in between), I've learned how important tracking your personal metrics are. I've trained my mind to always record the before/after for any project I work on and keep a written, screenshot'd record of the impact. Every single time. You should ALWAYS be ready to answer the question (presented to you in a direct or indirect manner), "Why should we continue paying you $X."

<comment><USER52> On this track, the question you want to have a good answer for is "Why should we pay you way more than $X?"

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my experience at Google.

<comment><USER53> I'm going to be applying there soon, 4 years into my career. It'll involve a loong move and big changes: what advice can you give someone who wants to spend a couple years (or more?) with the big G?

Also, any chance of submitting a referral? :)

<comment><USER54> Author writes article ranting about decision-making by groups of people who know nothing about them.

Commenter asks for referral from author who knows nothing about them.

<comment><USER55> Sounds like his head is already in the game!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of > bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn't reappear. I > deleted thousands of lines of code that were either dead or could be > replaced by modern libraries. I documented the pipeline as I learned it so > that the institutional knowledge was available to my teammates instead of > siloed in my head.

> The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was > quantifiable. I couldn't prove that anything I did had a positive impact on > Google.

I briefly took a part time job in college. It was at a mall, walking distance from school. It was a mid-range clothing brand that I can no longer remember the name of.

Ostensibly, it was a sales position. I'm pretty sure the word sales was in the title. Anyone who has ever walked into a store like that knows there is very little sales (as in salespeople exhibiting selling skills to make sales) occurring. It's 99% "can I help you?" followed by "just looking".

After a couple weeks my manager took me aside and said my sales numbers were bad. It wasn't a threat -- they were having a hard enough time keeping staffed -- but she pointed it out to me.

So, under no pressure to actually change those numbers, I decided to do it anyway. I figured out that if you stand at the cash register and the customer didn't explicit tell you who helped them, you could claim the sale for yourself.

A couple weeks later my numbers were through the roof! My manager congratulated me.

I don't think it's uncharitable to say that my story would equip anyone to navigate 95% of the corporate world.

There's a lot of FUD in this thread about working independently. So one more data point: I've known a number of people over the years that everyone here would know (by title if not by name). What do they have in common? They all struck out independently at some point in their careers.

It's not either / or. Going independent early can be a great way to sidestep a lot of the ladder-climbing sillyness you'll have to do. It will also, if you're doing it right, make you a lot better at your job.

</comment><comment><USER57> Google has one of the worst monocultures I've ever seen in my life with a heavy emphasis on commoditization. It's a giant machine treating software engineers as nothing more than easily replaceable cogs.

The perks and "easygoing" atmosphere play into this facade and are designed to delay the process of discovery. If you are after [significant] material benefits, by all means go work for Google but be prepared to be treated like a commodity. Ideally you will go through the same process of discovery the author did, faster, and will be able to adapt to extract the most out of the situation.

If you think programming is an art and despise corporate processes that constantly devalue it, then Google is one of the worst places you could be.

</comment><comment><USER58> I recognized your username from all your work in the Sia community. Thanks for helping to make it better.

While reading your article, I got the distinct impression that Google set up the system that way so they didn't have to give promotions. They get so many applications from the best software engineers in the world that they don't really have to work to retain people, and if they need a manager, there are plenty of those applying, too. I would suspect that in order to be promoted, you truly have to be exceptional and almost worthy of knighthood. The fact that your manager, who has intimate knowledge of your abilities, has no input into your advancement, and the fact that the metrics they look at are naturally difficult to achieve due to project churn makes it appear that they really don't want to promote anyone unless they have a very good reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that Google does _try_ to treat their employees fairly. I don't think the promo process is the way it is because of greed.

That said, I do think that the system is biased in Google's favor. It's designed much more strongly to filter out false positives (promote someone underqualified) than false negatives (withhold a promotion from someone qualified). As a result, it lets Google pay people at their lower-level title even though they're doing higher-level work.

<comment><USER59> I can understand why they do it, having someone incompetent in an important position is way more dangerous for the company than having someone competent stuck in a lower position.

But it's still a risk to lose good employees, talent is very valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Wow, that was _exactly_ the mechanic I observed when working there. The result was pockets in the company where people worked on stuff that they didn't understand and were not (yet?) clued in that nothing they did would get them promoted and yet if they broke anything it would get them fired. Helping those groups to change things for the better should have been a pretty impressive thing, but my observation was that wasn't understood by the promotion committee.

</comment><comment><USER61> A cacophony of management dissonance, bureaucratic internal processes, your job being outsourced to India and then being asked to clean up the mess created by said India team...

So basically Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got it.

<comment><USER62> "Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got it."

This applies to nearly every single tech company in the Valley at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I have had exactly the author's experience at prior jobs. Quite literally the EXACT experience.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was put on a project that was doomed to fail from day one. I was looking at it optimistically. It was a problematic system, and I knew I could improve it dramatically.

What happened instead? My improvements brought to light a lot of horrible stuff, and the new code was catching and alerting on previously hidden errors. This lead people in high places to believe I was reckless and shipping dangerously bad code, when it reality, it was not any worse off than before.

This led to my downfall. It was a sad lesson to learn, but office politics are everywhere. It's so important to recognize when you're being backed into a corner and given projects that are designed to fail.

</comment><comment><USER64> When someone tells me "I'm a software engineer at XYZ", the first thing I ask is - in what team are you in? If your role is to maintain internal web pages or to build random tools for the marketing team then yeah... it doesn't have any meaning. Sure, you still get the benefits of being an employee at XYZ, but it's not super fulfilling. I'd say %30 of developers work on cool things in these companies and the rest of the dev just fill in the blanks. I've worked at a few of the Big-5 and that's what I've observed mostly.

An other thing is - don't get pay by the hour. If you want to maximize your ROI you need to generate passive income there's no other secret. Your day is limited to only a few hours.

</comment><comment><USER65> Completely anecdotal but I was talking to a Googler who had basically the opposite experience and recommended working at Google because of the promotion panel. The fact that their manager had no say in the process and that they could put together their promotion packet on their own was a feature in their mind, because their experience included their manager "forgetting" to put them up for promotion repeatedly at other companies.

That being said, promotion processes do seem to be pretty screwed up in general (personal experience with 3 different companies), and fail in various ways. So it's worth keeping in mind that the "external promotion process" (getting another job) is always available.

edit: grammar.

<comment><USER21> I worked at Yahoo during a time of pseudo stack ranking (QPR). Managers had a target for average rating, and most managers would identify a few people for promotion and give everyone else "Meets Expectations" reviews so they could give the promotion candidates "Exceeds Expectations".

Even worse, managers generally used the success of their reports as part of their success criteria, so they we're always actively trying to promote people because if they didn't then they weren't successful at their jobs. So managers would help that one or two people get promoted, even if they we're generally useless. And the other devs on the team would get ignored.

It was a unique time in my career, when I had a performance review rating of "Exceeds Expectations" in a review that described my contributions as "mediocre".

To be fair, my manager was actually pretty good and acknowledged the disconnect is the review. I had been down leveled in an acquisition and was doing a job 2 levels higher than my own, and he wanted to give me useful feedback and knew nobody would actually read it but me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Frankly there are far more toxic and awful large companies to work for. I think with the perf/promo process being what it is Google was intentionally trying to avoid the really bad nepotistic and political parts of some other large (or not large) corps. But they introduced other problems, which the article writer alludes to.

For myself, the bullshit with perf and the awful corporate culture stuff became apparent within 6 months of landing here at Google as a result of acquisition. After working at a startup or small company (aka "get your shit done and fix all the things or we'll go out of business!") and getting drafted to work here (and ahem, eat the free food and take all the money they give you...) it's very apparent.

But I've stayed and slogged it through, and just stopped caring and just keep my head down and try to do the work I think is useful. Luckily Google has stopped promulgating the line that one _has_ to get promoted to Level X after Y years, or get ejected. There's a recognition now that people can just contribute at a certain level and be good employees and not play the promo game.

I know very few people who are believers in this culture internally. Anybody who has been through promo is cynical about it. Which is I guess why there's been some incremental changes to the process recently. We'll see how it shakes out.

</comment><comment><USER67> Pretty much why I left as well. Wasted years on improving existing stuff rather than building new stuff. Google doesn't value improvements, even very significant and quantifiable ones, except if you're improving CTR or relevance. Promotion-wise working on a hot new project which will flame out in a few years is 10x better for you to "demonstrate impact". Quality be damned. If you launch new shit, you get a lot more brownie points. Googlers, don't be stupid the way I was. If you're looking to get promoted, get on a hot new project and steadfastly maneuver away from any and all work that doesn't look worthwhile in your promo packet. This sucks for Google in the grand scheme of things. But the alternative will suck for you, and your first priority should be you, in spite of what anyone says. Anything else just leads to suckage and unhappiness.

</comment><comment><USER68> As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"?

Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours!

<comment><AUTHOR> >As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"?

That's fair.

I've wondered about that myself. Will I just end up resenting "the customer" the same way I resented "the committee?"

My hope is no because I feel like with a customer, I can learn more from failures. If I launch a product and it doesn't sell, I can try a totally new product or adjust it somehow and see how that affects things. I can talk to customers and get their feedback. With the promo committee it felt very opaque and my opportunities for feedback were so rare. Plus I felt like if I got better, I'm just getting better at working the perf system which is probably only useful within Google or other Google-like companies. If I get better at selling to customers, that should be useful in a much broader way.

>Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours!

Thanks for reading!

<comment><USER69> I prefer pitching to customers because they really do get more value out of your product if you better communicate what it does and how it helps them. With committees it sounds more like playing a zero-sum game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Good luck with your new programming adventures. Just based on reading your article I would say your mindset is in the right spot to be successful on your own.

I've been freelancing as a developer for the last 20 years and have turned down interviews from Google / etc. in the past. It's a fun ride.

> Optimizing for promotion

This is one of many reasons why I'll never work a "regular" job.

<comment><USER71> Hi Nick just popped in to say Thank You for your SAAS Flask course. I am slowly working through it along with the updated Flask Mega Tutorial

<comment><USER70> Hi, no problem.

Thanks so much for signing up to that course.

If you have any questions you know where to reach me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Article's gist: I an young and idealistic and I went working for Google thinking they're from another planet. That's not true.

<comment><USER73> My first full time job was as IT support for financial auditing/IT auditor. I didn't stay there long, but I learned this quickly: get a paper trail going ASAP. You never know when you'll need it, either to toot your own horn or to fight back, especially against bullshit :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> This question may be an odd one, but how did you create the little cartoons in your blog post? I feel like they really improved my experience as a reader, and if I were to create content in the future I wouldn't mind knowing if there was an easy way to include something similar for someone with little to no artistic skill.

Edit: Found my answer in this blog post of yours [https://mtlynch.io/how-to- hire-a-cartoonist/](https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/)

<comment><USER75> At the end of the article:

> Illustrations by Loraine Yow

which links to [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo- ology/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo-ology/)

I wondered if anyone would have not read to the end of the article and, like we both did, assume that the author had created the cartoons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Thats not just google mate, every large company is like this. We join thinking that our engineering will make a difference but it does not work like this. If you want to climb the ladder either join high, or grow through a smaller company.

</comment><comment><USER77> Thanks for writing this and good for you to finally leave that wasteland. I learned an important lesson on my first job "Don't be suckered into being loyal to your company because, no matter what they say, they are loyal to share holders, not to you".

On a side note, I don't understand the fetish with Google; where does this reality distortion come from that they have the best engineers? At _every_ company I have worked for I have been told "we have the best engineers" :) (I've been in Silicon Valley for 17+ years and Google is not that exceptional).

<comment><USER78> It's part of a subtle marketing machine. It starts with the interview process

Did you realize that Google is the single company in which people are _actually_ bragging about interviewing there? (even if the outcome was negative)

They also select a specific type of engineers that are influenceable enough to be convinced that everyone at Google are the absolute best. Those same engineers are then writing those type of Blog posts in which they pound the message over and over about being the best. It's a win-win. Good for their own ego, and good for the company as side marketing.

Now, I'm not saying that they are below average, but in the valley, I don't think Google has any more talents than other companies that don't make such a big deal about being _the best_

<comment><USER77> I want to add that I do think google has a _culture_ that allows great people more visibility. You don't see [as] many blogs by say Apple engineers :)

<comment><USER71> Thats coz, You sign a waiver as part of your "1 week intensive keeping secrets bootcamp + orientation" that Thou shalt not blog about _anything_ while you are employed at Apple. That means _anything_. Infact there is a very stringent policy on what is acceptable and not kosher when it comes to posting on social media. Thats why you dont see anything from Apple employees. Not that they didnt buy in to the Steve Jobs Think Different, Your work is so much more important than yourself Koolaid. Its just that posting anything without approvals can be a career limiting move. Source- Have a couple of friends working on Hardware side and one working Frameworks test group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Nice writeup! You should definitely keep writing.

Regarding what to optimize for promotion: I would say it's choosing the right manager (and peers, to a lesser extent).

I know somebody who has struggled to get promoted for multiple cycles (funnily enough, in the same large group you were in). Then he decided to move, and the new manager went out of her way to get him promoted, and he got it relatively quickly.

I've seen this scenario happen a lot in the last few years.

<comment><USER80> Yup. If you don't have a manager who works their ass off to help your career, you don't have a good manager. You recognize them by the fact that they usually talk _a lot_ about what management means, and what it should do, and aren't afraid to change that opinion if they learn something new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> _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._

My experience is that oftentimes people at Google-style companies play not even a zero-sum game, but more like a negative-sum game (if there is such a thing). If you're helping someone out, people will take that as an opportunity to take advantage of you.

<comment><USER41> This sounds harsh. In cases you are a significant contributor to a launch it should be signifiend in the "launch entry" (there's an internal tracking tool for all launches).

You then of course need to sell your contribution:

      - It was nothing less than ciritical for the success of the project
      - It required deep technical knowledge
      - It required communication with other teams
      - It required mastery of several technologies, etc.

The teammate in question should hepefully support these claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Sidebar: This was really great writing for a software engineer! It's a skill a lot of highly-technical people lack but can have great impact when you combine storytelling with technical expertise. I saw one of the author's plans was to write more and find ways to monetize it -- I wish him luck and gave him a Twitter follow to keep up.

</comment><comment><USER83> > If I ever made a mistake at Google that cost the company $10 million, I > would suffer no consequences. I'd be asked to write a post-mortem, and > everyone would celebrate the learning opportunity. For most of these > founders, a $10 million mistake would mean the end of their business and > several lifetimes of debt.

This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's true, and obviously there are a lot more situations at Google than a small company where you're even in a position to lose $10m.

But not all costs are proportional to company size. I could screw up a command on my AWS account and rack up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars cloud costs. I could make that mistake at a $1M/yr business or a $500/yr business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> If you %s/google/<your-current-company>/g , the story wouldn't change. It depends on the way you showcase your work to your management and peers is the secret of the success. But for some it is against idealism and "do good" nature. This same story happened to me but in another enterprise. The solution that worked for me is to find a Manager who knows your talent and gives you freedom and he does the marketing for your work knowing your strength. But it is uncommon to find a good manager that fits above qualities.

<comment><USER85> Totally agree, a good manager should do all the bragging so that "you" could really do the things that benefits yourself and the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> > I was surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced > development tools in the world.

This one might be ironic, but am I the only one feeling really annoyed by the fact that every engineer working at Google feels like every other engineers at Google is "the best in the world" ? Beside the obvious arrogance, I cannot tell if it's a subtle brainwashing or a complete lack of critical thinking.

(not only for Google, I saw the same remarks from Facebook and a couple of the other big ones, but Google is by far the most prevalent)

<comment><USER86> Google, Facebook, Palantir, Microsoft - it's a narrative that those organizations spend dollars to support because it helps them in recruitment and in b2b consulting. It is similar in investment banking and management consulting. The employees lap it up, and learn to talk-the-talk. Each of these tech companies are cash cows with huge locked-in revenue streams that do not depend so much on innovation for survival. IMO Amazon and Apple seem to be organized around accountability and sink or swim projects which create a different walk-the-walk culture, similar to start ups. Though I'm just an outsider looking in.

<comment><USER78> My feeling also. The whole "At Google everyone is THE smartest in the world": This is marketing "talk-the-talk".

It's crazy once you realize how easy it is to make the employees repeat the ego-flattering "talk-the-talk" without them realizing they are part of a huge marketing machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> > I submitted my first promo packet, and the results were what I feared: the > promotion committee said that I hadn't proven I could handle technical > complexity, and they couldn't see the impact I had on Google.

Ha! I think the promotion committees have a rubber stamp with that justification. It's so vague and unactionable, yet they tell _everyone_ that on their first go round.

The second time around, you get to point their feedback and say "Last time you told me to do X, Y, and Z. I did X, Y, and Z. Shit or get off the pot."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, exactly. I only found out after I did my first promo attempt that the committee is expected to grant the promotion if you've fixed the gap the last committee identified. I wish I'd known about that earlier so I could have gotten my gaps defined explicitly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> You don't _try_ to get promoted in engineering. You do a kickass job, and those above you notice and promote you or at least give you a raise/bonus.

Now that sounds naive, but the reason this works is because you are actually in power. You can easily find another job granting you more pay, especially with something like Google on your resume.

In my 20+ years of software development I've never asked for or even pursued a promotion. If the job wasn't taking care of me, I went elsewhere with a nice 20% raise.

<comment><USER89> I'm glad that this has worked for you but it's not like that for everyone. Also it's very stupid in many ways that people constantly just have to jump ship to get a raise. I might really love my work, be learning a lot, work with great people, but I have to fight tooth and nail to get a raise -or- waste a bunch of my time constantly talking to new companies. And then my current company loses someone with a lot of domain knowledge too. I love programming. I really do wish I could just sit down and code. Companies are always talking about wringing out the last drops of productivity but they don't reward programmers for focusing on code, but instead the business side of things and constantly jumping ship.

I play the game like most people do, of course. But it's a stupid game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)?

<comment><USER91> I highly recommend optimizing for salary for the first 4 years.

~10k/year * ~40 years of compound interest is significant. Most young people have debt and getting rid of that fast opens up a lot more options and flexibility.

On top of that company's that pay more have more incentive to maximize your value. On the other hand if you make little then they have incentive to burn you out and replace you ASAP.

<comment><USER90> I agree with you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Google doesn't use something like SonarQube I guess. That's full of metrics like "fixed x bugs, improved code quality y%, reduced SQALE technical debt to z."

I can't say I blame author for leaving Google. So called "senior" devs who crank out garbage and then foist maintenance on lower level devs aren't people I want to work with either. They're going to keep you down as mid-level janitor until you get the stats to back your story up. Static code analysis can paint that picture quite nicely for management. Sadly, that didn't seem like an option at Google.

If enough janitors leave, the whole place will stink soon. I think the author was wise to stand up for himself. Other Googlers who feel that way should join him.

</comment><comment><USER71> Wow!. Really inspiring write-up. Thanks for sharing. No. You are not an idiot. When you find time, please pick-up "Anything You want" by Derek Sivers. Essentially, You don't need a business idea. You just make something that "helps" people however vague that might sound. GOod luck with your venture and Indie Hackers is Great and Channing Allen has built a Great community around it with an awesome podcast to boot!. Who knows you could even be back at Google after "successfully" bootstrapping your startup for a few years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading! I've heard a few people recommend Derek Sivers, so I'll add him to my list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I always knew Google incentivizes the launch of "new" products, but the breadth and depth of the extent wasn't apparent. I now understand why Google Talk has so many short-lived reincarnations. On the flipside, this also disincentivizes maintenance/up-keep of old products - Reader never had a chance.

It ironic that Google's share class/structure relieves its C-level management from short-term/quarter-by-quarter thinking, but at the same time it pressures the rank-and-file to have short horizons.

</comment><comment><USER94> That conversation made me realize that I'm not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money.

</comment><comment><USER95> With 11 years of experience, maintaining a legacy system and writing docs does NOT sound like sr. level promo material to me. At <Equivalent BigCo>, sr. level promo was tantamount to rearchitecting an existing product, leading a team in multiple-person-years development effort.

I appreciate the message around difficulty in quantifying impact, but just putting this into practical perspective, I think OP's manager may have failed to manage his expectations around what constitutes promo material.

<comment><USER96> That attitude is pretty illustrative of a larger problem. Maybe the work of bug fixing and maintenance of legacy systems is undervalued, which might explain why those systems get into such sorry shape to begin with at big companies like Google.

My main takeaway from this piece is that it's easy for the incentive structure at big tech companies to get all out of whack. The most useful, most necessary work is often times not the work that benefits the employee most. This is pretty basic management 101 where you want to incentivize good behaviors by aligning the company's interests with those of the employees. When that incentive alignment is working it eliminates the need for employees to choose between the company and themselves. Everyone wins.

When it isn't working you get stories like the author's — the individual becomes unhappy and leaves and the company loses a valuable employee.

<comment><USER95> Not disagreeing just saying it sounds like his expectations were mis-managed.

Whole story seems like a CF frankly and representative of the reasons why I've never even considered interviewing at Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> > Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google.

Didn't take me long to realize that most company events and get-togethers and volunteering and other assorted non business activities are bullshit and a complete waste of time.

Like he said.. "it's a business relationship"

</comment><comment><USER98> I dunno, it seems like the learning process of putting together a series of unsuccessful promo packages might be the exact training you need to become "senior".

If the (good) work you did wasn't reflected in the metrics, then you need to figure out how to change the metrics, or change what you work on.

There's nothing inherently scummy or "political" about influencing the collective direction: identify problems, come up with good ideas for solutions and how to measure (partial) success, and talk it over with your team and manager around the time goals are being set. People are biased, distracted, and fallible, but generally recognize good ideas when they are communicated clearly.

If you're not good at documenting your successes, reflect on what is and isn't getting documented, and find ways to set yourself up for success the next time. Talk to people who've gotten the promotion you want, and figure out what you've missed.

Learning to independently identify problems, devise solutions, measure success, document success, and advocate for your ideas and yourself are essential skills for the human organizational / business part of writing code for a living. This is true whether you work on your own, at a startup, or at a bigco like Google.

Good luck! :-)

</comment><comment><USER99> This might work for a company with no competition and railway cars full of advertising money coming their way regardless of their actions.

In other places these things end up as a massive disaster and end up creating a culture of sabotage. There is a lot of backroom dealing that goes in these 'anonymous' committees. People who sit there aren't individual evaluators like in a public exam. They are generally people who come from teams around you. And they try to optimize and sabotage based on what is good for them. For example, a well deserving candidate's promotion can be turned down for a total irrelevant reason, while some political lackey could get promoted by adding all sort of cooked up recommendations to their 'promotion packet'. Most of the times all this is done so secretly that when promotions are announced the come across as a shock to most people. Of course people see through this all the time, and cubicles full of employee always talk of 2 + 3 not adding up to 5 in these cases.

Another huge scam in these things is the 'important work' bogey. You could have contributed way more code, fixed a lot more bugs and added a lot more value, but your promotion can be denied on the grounds of not doing 'important work'. What the definition of 'important work' is nobody knows, as its largely defined by work done by the guy getting promoted, no matter what work that is.

There are more things to this. For example, salary negotiations play another toxic game here. In most companies budgets are fixed. So a manager is likely to reward his lunch buddy far more than other people in the team. Eventually over 3 - 4 years you realize some of your team mates are now making way more disproportionate money compared to their peers and the work. This spills into all sorts of other opportunities.

The best thing I heard was from one manager, who told, if your manager isn't telling your for sure a few months in advance that you are getting promoted, you most likely aren't.

In most companies its already decided who gets promoted, they just have to do these 'promotion packet' and 'anonymous committee' rituals to cook up documentation to justify it, to protect themselves from law suits later.

All of this called 'negotiation' by those who benefit from these schemes. In reality it is getting financial and other favors in return for proximity and servitude to power.

</comment><comment><USER100> Hi, Indie Hacker here who also has some experience with politicized corporate environments. I'd like to encourage you to ignore some of the bad advice in this thread.

Sounds like you were in a gnarly situation and did well to get out. You are what you do, and those types of places can have a long-term corrupting influence on your professional habits and instincts.

The observation that "all companies have politics" is about as useful as the observation that both Venezuela and Denmark have imperfect governments. These statements are correct only in the narrowest sense.

Those pointing out that you never work for "yourself" are also technically correct. If you own a business, you have a responsibility toward your customers. The good news is that it's possible to find a niche in which you actually _like_ your customers and _enjoy_ doing right by them. Running your own company also gives you the opportunity to optimize for what you think is important, both personally and professionally.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading and for your advice!

I like your analogy about Venezuela and Denmark. : )

I do think they have a point. Throughout this process I've continually tried to consciously avoid a "grass is always greener" mentality and recognize that starting my own company will have difficult challenges as well. So I appreciate the feedback from both sides.

That said, Indie Hackers is filled with stories of people who left corporate jobs and found greater satisfaction in their own companies, so I think it varies by person and requires some luck. I'd like to see what happens regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> The more I hear about the inner workings of Google, the less impressed I am. It seems their vaunted hiring process has let in folks who specialize more at internal politicking than getting things done. It doesn't take too many of those kind of people to ruin a culture, and cause a company to stagnate or go backwards.

<comment><USER102> I don't know that it is so much that the Google hiring process has selected for adept internal politicians as it is that Google hasn't paid as much attention to human factors as it should.

A lot of Google's philosophy is about automating things a person normal would use their judgment on and just choosing not to perform some human-centric functions at all (e.g. customer support).

It's hard to get internal culture right in the best of circumstances. When you treat like an algorithm and you don't get that algorithm right, it encourages all sorts of maladaptive behavior, politicking, etc.

To be fair Google's promotion board is not as flawed as say, Microsoft's old stack ranking system. But it does set up incentives in such a way that to advance people may optimize their work in a way that doesn't benefit the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> If you like this kind of post, there are many: Why I quit x: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22why%20I%20Quit%22&sort=byPo...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22why%20I%20Quit%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER104> And dozens of "I left google" : [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22I%20left%20google%22&sort=b...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22I%20left%20google%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> this is a highly enjoyable read, and i am glad i found your pet project since I am trying keto diet myself :)

however i can't say that i agree with your main thesis. It's pretty wild if you think about it that someone would work at Google with all those perks yet focus on such petty negatives. No x-mas gift? join the 90% of all other companies. No "Senior" title before 3 years? This is not at all unusual. At least your company had a framework for promoting employees and they were willing to give you a chance every 6 months (even if its not a perfect evaluation, it's a system that may get improved over time). Nope no sympathy here but i do hope working on your own gives you more happiness! I did find your project details helpful and inspirational

</comment><comment><USER106> A good rant and first foray into politics for the OP, I would imagine. C'est La vie. IMHO, the next step for OP is to learn how to play the game and add "finding a paying customer" to that list of what's next. Google "persuasion reading list".

<comment><USER107> Sounds interesting, but is there a less politically-charged reading list along these lines with less Trump / Trump boosterism?

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> Strange that you don't personally go before a board to present which was my experience at a Large tech company in the uk - relying only on written "packets" would seem to discriminate for neurotypicals.

Btw anyone know what the number of promotion slots a year for the eligible population is in google?

When I worked in Systems engineering division (67k FTE) in BT there where 18 or so mpg2-> mpg4 every 18 months (if we were lucky) approx. 600 would pass the paper shift to get on the short list.

I was told by my boss that getting on the short list meant they thought you where capable of doing the job group finance wouldn't approve of small in crease in pay quanta - I knew some people so desperate they took a transfer to payphones to get a promotion.

</comment><comment><USER109> This is an perfect illustration that a company gets exactly what it rewards and it measures. Initially it works out just fine because the field for the company is wide open so regardless of what it measures and it rewards the results look good enough.

</comment><comment><USER110> I thought google was supposed to be an industry leader in assessing and managing human assets. This whole thing boils down to making a simple problem complex.

The simple solution is that direct superiors and co-workers are the best resources for determining viability. The junior engineer he trained is better informed than the entire promotion committee with their metrics packet. Maybe it works sometimes but for all the millions(billions?) Google has invested into dissecting how teams and human resources work, this is a case where they totally failed and a very basic solution would have worked.

<comment><USER111> Not really - the counterpoint to that is that giving supervisors too much direct power is also an invitation for bias, blindspots, or abuse of power. You also don't want to slip into stack ranking (witness how demoralizing it was at Microsoft), which is easy if you don't have a way of getting globally calibrated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> You provide a service write code for the company so that the company makes good profits in exchange you get a salary.

Nobody cares if you work hard over time unless your projects are late.

Lessons learnt spend time with your loved ones.

</comment><comment><USER113> There's so many comments, I'm sure this will get lost. But just so you understand what the grass looks like on the other side.

At Google you got paid a great salary, had great 401k and perks to work on projects that most likely go nowhere.

Working for yourself you're sacrifcing all those perks, to work on projects that will most likely go nowhere.

That said, definitely do it. It will teach you a ton in the process, everyone should go out on their own, mostly to realize how hard it can be.

New perspectives are invaluable, so I applaud your decision and wish you all the luck in the world!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, I recognize that's definitely a possible outcome. Perhaps it's statistically the most likely outcome. But I agree with you that it's worth doing if for nothing else to see what it's like. At worst, I go back to being an employee again somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> Hate to be the guy who says matter of fact things so matter of factly, but the author just stated that when he was programming he was happy and when he was calculating how to exceed at the game, he almost got promoted, but wasn't happy.

When he was only focusing on the metrics, he was ignoring everything else. That is unethical. That is calculated. That is unreal. That is the yellow brick road to unhappiness and a horrible career.

The main problem was the constant reorg. He couldn't get a project done with completion.

</comment><comment><USER115> All they need to do is add employee ranking to fulfill their destiny and finally become Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER116> The best thing an employer can do for an employee is assign explicit value to that employee's work. Otherwise, the burden lies on the employee regardless of the fact that a manager may declare solid performance. If the value of your work isn't clear, you will suffer in the long run via missed promotions and potential layoffs.

Sadly, if your project's value is not well understood, you need to get off of it.

</comment><comment><USER117> This is exactly how many many many people feel, with one difference - <USER2> people don't even get the chance to pick up good skills, tech or otherwise. They are stuck doing the same thing for months and years. Add to it visa, family complications and the situation gets worse.

At least he learned a lot, has Google on his resume, I'm genuinely happy for him.

I hope he really makes it! More indie hackers the better.

</comment><comment><USER118> A little OT, but I wonder what recruiters / interviewers think of people who took time off to bootstrap their own business but ultimately went back to applying for a regular job. Having the option to go back to working for a big corporation is a good safety net, so it would be an important factor if taking a year off would drastically reduce the likelihood of being hired again.

</comment><comment><USER119> The google promotion process sounds about as horrendous as their hiring process.

</comment><comment><USER120> This is why its healthier to always run with the premise that you're leaving at some point and its the employer's responsibility to keep you there and give you interesting and rewarding work. If you're asking them to promote you then its the wrong way round, they should be asking on you about whether you're staying there. That's how the market is today.

<comment><USER26> I doubt Google cares if the majority of it's people stay or not. Beyond the rock star employees who they absolutely know they need/depend on, they have an unending pipe of software engineers who want to put Google on their resume, in part due to the value of having the resume item and in part due to all of the perks.

Assuming the free food and massages will keep a lot of talent there, why would they bother incentivizing the average individual employee with interesting work and promotions? If you leave, they'll replace you, likely without shedding a tear.

<comment><USER120> afaik their "average individual employee" is actually pretty damn good. Anyway that's the point, if they don't care then you shouldn't remain there trying to impress them, especially if that doesn't align with your life goals.

<comment><USER26> Sure, I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I just meant, if they have an endless flow of "pretty darn good" employees, they have no particular need to try to retain any given one.

Other companies may have to search hard to find excellent software engineers, but Google does not.

<comment><USER121> It's still really important. There's a cost to training and getting an engineer to understand the problems and scale that Google faces (some might come in with that, but many do not). There's also domain/google specific knowledge that's expensive to replace as well.

Yes, if someone leaves after 4 years, it's possible to hire someone else of the same ability level, but you're going to spend time and effort to make them as effective as the person who just left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> Reading through this comment section I get the feeling a lot of folks here are rather confused about what it is they really want. On one hand they care about producing quality work, and value doing meaningful work like helping others or solving problems nobody else wants to touch, and on the other hand they expect to receive this senior title in recognition of their efforts and get disillusioned when they fail to do so.

There's so much resentment in this thread about colleagues who have titles, when they aren't producing superior work. You're clearly judging your peers (and by extension yourself) based on quality of work, so why care about the title? If you can write good code, or design great APIs, or build excellent tests or clean up outdated codebases, I don't care if your title is Emperor of the Universe or Junior Intern, you're welcome on my team any time and I'll be glad to have you on board and build awesome products with me.

If you want to get that title, then by all means go play the title game like the author. Focus on metrics, forget about producing meaningful work, and you'll be on the fast lane to become one of those people that you resent right now.

Anyone remember those "unprofessional" titles like "Chief Executive Ninja" and whatnot that were so popular in the startup scene a while ago? These people were simply signaling that they didn't really care about titles and cared about other things instead, like building product, or adding value in some form. I used to work at a startup where everyone could pick their own title; so anyone could be a senior engineer if they wanted to. Ofcourse it didn't matter if they did, because nobody was judged by their title, but by their work. If that's what you want, then go and find a place like that; they exist!

Kudos to the author for figuring out what he wants.

<comment><USER123> I think because tech is well off compared to other industries, tech workers delay a certain type of adulthood maturity. This isn't functioning in society maturity but the maturity of finding and knowing your place.

To the young everyone has high hopes for you mostly because they want that energy and drive. At a certain point however you aren't valued based in your individual technical contribution but your ability to support existing narrative structures.

The shock from people feeding you your own narrative heroes journey to expecting you to kiss ass and support existing stories is specific to tech because of the relatively new and parallel "journeyman engineer" career path that tops out around 300k. The remaining paths are the thought-leader/genius path and the traditional corporate man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> My takeway from reading that this article is that being a software developer at Google is a shit-show - just like everywhere else ;)

</comment><comment><USER125> > You're in a business relationship with Google. If you're disappointed that > Google isn't "romancing" you with gifts like you do for your wife, you have > a misguided notion of the relationship.

This line is the best summary how most companies treat their employees, despite whatever the company promote about internal community, team building, etc...

</comment><comment><USER126> If you had a union, you could have a say in how promotions are handled.

This is how the whole industry works. They will be more than happy to keep you low, doing useful work relatively cheaply, indefinitely.

On the other hand, cry me a river. There are a million and a half families, including 3 million children, in the US living on less than $2/person/day.

</comment><comment><USER127> This article may as well be used to describe my employer or many other companies that have more people than the quantity of work. My suggestion: join a company that figures out how to manage visibility, such as Netflix. Or join a company that does not need to manage visibility, such as a fast-growing startup.

</comment><comment><USER128> > It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

This was the beginning of the end for me. I don't care about the gift at all; if I wanted something I would have already bought it. But it was the idea that an easy way to cut costs was the solution to everything. Ignore the fact that there are three separate teams working on literally every problem at Google. No, what's really costing them money is buying everyone a phone every year. (Which, BTW, you can just order from TechStop. You don't own it, of course, but what value does a phone have in two years anyway? The cost of buying it is the same to Google whether or not you keep it forever or for the duration of the contract. But ordering the phone from TechStop doesn't buy much goodwill, like maybe getting a free phone and giving it to your family does.)

> The pipeline's failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies > instead of silently passing along bad data.

Anyway, I kind of heavily disagree with the promotion/performance review complaints. I was on a promotion committee a number of times at Google, and my committees always loved stuff like increasing reliability, adding metrics, and doing the "dirty work" to keep things running smoothly. This, if true, is the pinnacle of what's valued as solid engineering work.

The thing is, I was reviewing people a level below me (that would be the L3->L4 committee -- like the author, I was a senior software engineer), and that's the kind of work I expect at that level. To get from Senior to Staff (L5->L6), you expect this kind of thinking but across multiple teams. It is not as simple as sweet-talking people into doing stuff for you (which is what a lot of people think leadership is), it's more of facilitating productivity in your area of expertise. So if your general area of work has a lot of problems with flaky pipelines -- you need to get the metrics in there, you need to teach other people how to use the metrics to direct their development goals, you need to make the changes easy to test... basically, you need to make the less-experienced of your teammates able to operate in your specific area as efficiently as you. Because then those people can go out and get the dirty work done (getting promoted in the process), and you can bring your bigger-picture analysis and implementation skills to a new problem.

Something I saw while on committees was people that were performing the responsibilities of their level on the "ladder" spectacularly. That does not necessarily mean that they are doing anything at the level that they're requesting promotion to. A new level is a new job, not just doing your current job really well. (For that, you just get a pay increase, not a title change.) I really think that's what was going on with the author; he was performing Senior-level work really well. That does not make you a Staff engineer. Additionally, there is no particular demand that you ever become a Staff engineer. I think my W2 for the last year I worked at Google was something like $270,000 as a Senior engineer. That is good money. So the question is, do you need more, so you're mad that you're not getting promoted... or do you just want something because there are levels and you want to be the highest?

Certainly, by working for yourself you can avoid all of this. You can always tell yourself that you're the best person in the world and nobody is going to disagree with you. I always saw the ladder as a way of suggesting what sort of classes of problems to work on to work more efficiently and effectively, and by working in that direction you were growing as an engineer.

<comment><USER129> FWIW, he was a Software Engineer aspiring to be a Senior Software Engineer.

 _The promotion committee noted that in the past six months, I clearly demonstrated senior-level work. These were, uncoincidentally, the months when I was optimizing for promotion._

 _But they felt that six months wasn't a long enough track record, so… better luck next time._

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> It has been so long since I quit my last day job (2005), that I can't really remember what it was like or what made me quit.

But I can tell you this. I would not have been this productive if I'd stayed on at my cushy software developer job. I've had way more fun too.

</comment><comment><USER131> Noticed your new project is a keto recipe webapp - this will have to compete with some good ones: [https://ketodietapp.com/](https://ketodietapp.com/), and [https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/](https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/) . Fascinated by how ruled.me in particular seems to have won the 'indexed by google' game for 'keto recipes.' Also fascinated by how much ruled.me might be making with adsense. Also generally fascinated by special interest communities and how to monetize them, any content around strategy here would be greatly appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER132> Whenever I sense politics is more important to promotion that great job, I am leaving. I went into this field idealistic, driven for creating technology that can change lives for the better, and way too often artificial red tape is put everywhere by clueless or outright evil managers in order to drive their agenda and increase their chances for promotions and more $ into their pockets. It's literally negation of every single value I stand for and often have no choice but to leave and work on my own projects. Even the best companies like author mentioned aren't immune to human nature and have many blind spots.

</comment><comment><USER133> Politics is everywhere. Misaligned incentives are everywhere.

The best you can do is find a place where those with the power to promote also have skin in the game. Usually that means working directly for an owner, or being an owner yourself.

Politics dominates when those who do the promotion do not suffer the consequences of losing good people or promoting bad people.

All organizations become shit after they grow to 10,000+ people. It's not possible for politics to be kept out at that scale. Google may be worse than many other places because its steady profits allow it to keep many useless individuals on the rolls, who would be fired elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER134> This guy spent 2 years realizing that "it's a business relationship". I worked at another smaller bay area company and I only spent 2 months to realize that. Google is already much better.

</comment><comment><USER135> Thank you for sharing this. Your story actually made me think about myself - whether I am actually doing something because I believe it's best for company goals, or I am doing something because I want my work to be visible and viewed as valuable.

I work in a very small team, where promotions don't exist, but I am more aware now, that I often try to work on taks which are more easily recognizable as "wow you did something cool", instead of focusing on quality of code and work. And that's just because I fear to seen as a slacker.

</comment><comment><USER136> I've been there, done that (quit another MNC, not Google).

Unfortunately in the real world, hardly anyone wants your new product, and people are so accustomed to polished products that work on every platform, that one person can hardly deliver something pay-worthy nowadays. Not to mention it's so difficult to land on an idea that people really want, and that idea itself is something doable by one or two persons at most (bootstrap model)

After 6 months of hardly any income, had to eat humble pie and get back to employment (for now).

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER137> Google always was one of the few companies I wished to join. That feeling has decreased over the years, and now this article might have killed it completely.

I'm happy with what I'm doing anyway.

</comment><comment><USER138> Well, Google is a big company. Politics are a thing. A lot of younger hires don't know how to navigate that kind of environment. I had a lot of trouble in that area. I joined a smaller firm and things improved dramatically. As the smaller firm grew, I grew into understanding and learning how to navigate politics gradually.

You find this in every single industry. I used to work in public accounting and it was just like this. Google isn't special in this regard.

To author: good luck! If your startup takes off, let us know!

</comment><comment><USER139> Is it just me, or do stories like this make it increasingly clear that working at large companies like Google, Amazon, etc are a mistake?

Getting on a company that becomes Google/Amazon/etc (or more likely doesn't but that's life) is one thing, getting sucked into the corporate dystopia described in that blog post is quite another.

I guess I'll continue to work at smallish start-ups because the idea of being swallowed by a programmer black-hole doesn't appeal :-)

<comment><USER140> It really depends. Smallish companies cannot afford to pay nearly as well as the big ones. Sometimes a few years of dystopian hellish work is worth the money. For example, if you then use said saved money to start your own venture with no need for Other People's Money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER141> There is no reason anymore for the ambitious to work for the man. They will forever be trying to think of a _lord-serf_ relationship as a _mercantile_ one. Aided by earnest attempts by the company to help them delude themselves into thinking so.

If you want control over your economic destiny, you need to be in business for yourself. There is no middle ground between being a serf and being a merchant. At least not in our profession.

</comment><comment><USER123> Once Quality is defined it no longer is Quality. Instead it opens the way for gatekeepers to stand guard around their moat and claim Quality eventually corrupting the original definition.

To try and hold onto that which cannot be held onto is the path of good intentions that leads to hell. It is the temporary victory of bean counters while the human spirit nurses it's wounds.

</comment><comment><USER142> Speaking as a >6 year veteran (Xoogler) some of this rings true. Still a couple of points:

> No, managers at Google can't promote their direct reports. They don't even > get a vote.

This isn't quite true. It's true that the promo committee doesn't include your manager and it's that committee's vote that determines your promotion BUT your manager does get to say whether or not they support your promotion.

Anecdotally, committees expect to see manager support so if a potential promotee has it, it doesn't mean a lot unless there is a lot of specific information that the manager can provide to support the promotion (ideally peer feedback should do this anyway). It tends to be an issue if your manager doesn't support your promotion however. And this happens. It also happens that people get promoted without manager support.

Personally I never understood how this situation arose. I operate under the principle that there should never be "negative surprise". So if your manager doesn't support your promotion (which, hopefully, is solely because it's the manager's informed belief that it won't pass committee) then the report should already know this before they decide to submit for promotion. If they don't, that's a giant manager fail.

If the report goes up anyway, if I were a manager there's absolutely nothing to be gained from not supporting the promotion.

Moving on to the other points:

> Metrics or it didn't happen

There's a lot of truth to it but not in the way the guy intends I think. He goes on to say that there were no metrics for what he was doing.

Well that's the first problem. You should create them. And it sounds like this guy was looking to a T4 to T5 promotion. There's a certain amount of independence and proactiveness required for T5+ so not creating the metrics to measure his successes by is an issue.

The manager again bears some responsibility for this. One of the primary jobs of a SWE manager (IMHO) is coaching their reports for situations like this and building their careers.

A better way to say this is that impact matters. Working on a bunch of small, unrelated things is not impact. Promotion isn't a matter of doing a lot of work or being helpfully necessarily. By T5+ it's an issue of having impact across your project and to your wider team.

Also, it's worth noting that often people do have to go up for the same promo twice. The natural instinct for committees is not to promote and they'll give you feedback as to why. So then 6 months down the track you submit an updated packet that includes all the ways you've addressed the previous committee's feedback. That's really common.

As for the holiday gift, yeah I was there for that. All I was say is that it was bad optics, particularly in light of say, how much money was handed out to Levandowski. The argument was that it was too expensive to adminster across so many different countries. This may be true but it feels like penny-pinching and cost-cutting. And as they say, as soon as they take away the free drinks it's time to pack your bags. The issue isn't the free drinks, it's what it signals.

Project cancellation! Been there twice. It's highly demotivating.

<comment><USER128> > committees expect to see manager support so if a potential promotee has it, > it doesn't mean a lot

Having been on a promotion committee a number of times, I have to say that manager feedback is generally pretty useless at face-value. A good manager will make sure the right peers write reviews and that the candidate didn't forget anything important. But the candidate can smooth over all of this themselves; my committee promoted someone who's manager feedback read something like "TODO: write this". That reflects poorly on the manager, not the candidate.

> looking to a T4 to T5 promotion

I think he was looking for T5 to T6 actually.

> Project cancellation! Been there twice. It's highly demotivating.

RIP us.

<comment><USER142> From the article:

> If I just kept going, I'd soon be promoted to the next level, Senior > Software Engineer.

That's (being promoted to) T5.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, I was looking to be promoted to T5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER143> Heck yeah! It's great to read this. Large companies will bleed you dry and not remember your name. It's better to be the survivor of a failed startup than a star at a huge company. Better than being the survivor of a failed startup is the owner of a successful one. You'll never know that last one if you don't try.

</comment><comment><USER144> I used to work at {OTHER_BIGCO} and felt the same. It was so bad at one point, I could basically toss a coin if I was going to work on something different that week. It was at point I realized there was no chance the promised promotion would come (well that and the lack of senior devs to observe) that I decided to move on.

</comment><comment><USER145> He can try Startcrowd platform, it is a side-project platform designed with Googlers in mind: [https://hackernoon.com/no-kaggle-is-unsuitable-to-study- ai-m...](https://hackernoon.com/no-kaggle-is-unsuitable-to-study-ai-ml-a- reply-to-ben-hamner-27283878cede)

</comment><comment><USER146> >So if Google and I have a business relationship that exists to serve each side's interests, why was I spending time on all these tasks that served Google's interests instead of my own? If the promotion committee doesn't reward bugfixing or team support work, why was I doing that?

That's where the culture failed.

</comment><comment><USER147> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPop...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Serious question, why is Quitting Google such a big deal?

<comment><USER148> Because it's touted as the company to get a job at and leaving it means something is wrong with you and you need to write up a blog post justifying why you left teh best position ever!!!!1!

</comment></comment><comment><USER149> "I was in a business relationship with Google". The point that most employees especially in the US forget. It's strictly business for the company. Whatever incentives they offer is for the company's well being. Feelings like "proud to work for xxx company" is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER150> one take away I found: ship early ship often

For all the projects I've done over the years, I didn't "wait til the end" to ship something. Get a feature done and ship it out. If you wait until "it's finished" it will never be and you risk both losing interest and losing clients.

</comment><comment><USER151> I think Paul Graham's old "Hiring is Obsolete" post sets the right framework for thinking about this, why it happens, and the arbitrage opportunity that is present.

[http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html](http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html)

</comment><comment><USER152> Short answer: OP can afford that.

</comment><comment> real-hacker Working for a big company is stable but fragile (you can lose the job, or become a special cog that cannot fit into any other machine).

Working for yourself is risky at the very beginning, but anti-fragile, given you know what you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER153> This is exactly why I am going to start my own company in my own name and start being a contractor with my 'employers'. Why be a slave when we only have a limited amount of years on this planet?

</comment><comment><USER154> Where is the metric for being a team player? Patrick Lenceoni's book, 'The Ideal Team Player' defines the 3 main traits of a team player: Humble, Hungry, and People-Smart.

</comment><comment><USER155> Good luck, mate! Really, I believe you've taken the right decision. Even if you fail, that will be much better than continuing the environment you've described!

</comment><comment><USER40> On average does anyone know how many GSU's Google is offering these days for a Senior (L5) engineer?

(either new Senior hire, or joined Google within the past 2 years)

</comment><comment><USER156> So, I don't think Google described what senior engineer means to him. Senior engineer means first that you a practitioner and can execute on software projects, but second it means you can influence others. From his own description, I would not be in favor of promotion as there was no evidence of influence. Instead of writing E2E tests, he could of influenced others to write E2E tests and the metric would be the number of diffs where he got people to write E2E tests.

It requires beyond stellar technical work to overlook the influencing aspect.

</comment><comment><USER126> "Nothing to show for it"... except the bank to go work for yourself and years of extremely valuable experience

</comment><comment><USER157> Man, the more I read these comments, the luckier I feel about working for Atlassian!

</comment><comment><USER158> Hey Michael, best of luck on your new adventure and hope you continue working on ketohub! ;)

\- Dhruv

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, Dhruv! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER159> haha, I have a guy like this in my job. He won't do ANYTHING that couldn't be represented in a promotion document. Which is annoying but at the same time he is always successful with his promotions

</comment><comment><USER160> This was an excellent post, and I loved the comics. But the situation sounds like a real nightmare. I recently read a blog post about burnout [1], and "lack of control" was one of the main factors.

The Indie Hackers community is awesome. I've been thinking about starting a tech cooperative along those lines [1], where the members have full control of their own projects and can work on whatever they want. The goal would be to build some small SaaS products or mobile apps, and generate a bit of money. The value of joining a cooperative is that we could try many different ideas in parallel and share a fraction of the winning ideas, similar to a VC who invests in a large number of startups. The other benefit is that we can build a much closer community than Indie Hackers, because everyone has a stake in the company. We'd be independent, but could still work together to help each other succeed.

Anyway, if this sounds like something that appeals to you, feel free to fill out this application form [2]. (I've heard from some really awesome people but will keep the form up for a while.)

[1] [https://m.signalvnoise.com/avoiding-the- trap-8df59e718f3e](https://m.signalvnoise.com/avoiding-the-trap-8df59e718f3e)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm- SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiK...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm- SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiKe920sTOV_Y2FAmaY/viewform)

</comment><comment><USER161> Working at big companies it is very important to choose which projects to work on, and which to not work on. You should be asking your manager, product manager, whoever, to explain in detail how your project is going to be helping. Why is it even necessary? If it's a smaller part of a big system, what is the bigger system doing, and is this project really going to help it in some way? And in some way I mean some way that can be easily measured and demonstrable. The business case must be crystal clear.

If it's new development, how do they know this feature or thing is going to work, or is needed? What work has been done to verify these assumptions, and what is the risk? If there is any data collected, user stories, or customer interviews, ask to see that information. Ask to see any roadmaps or presentations given to higher level managers. Ask to be included in any product meetings or customer interviews. If they balk at any of this, it's a red flag that they are unwilling to be open with their plans. In my experience, this normally means they know their own plans are bullshit or they simply don't exist. It's really amazing how many managers and senior level people at these companies operate on bullshit. I've seen it so many times.

The purpose of all this is to insulate and protect yourself from the failure of your own management. If a manager keeps cancelling your projects, ask why? Personally after a manager has cancelled one of my projects more than once and there isn't a good explanation why (i.e. something I myself wouldn't have seen coming), I start to question and doubt his decision making ability, and I'm less likely to want to work on his team or do his assigned work. I immediately start looking at other options for how I can benefit the company. This is a tricky situation in itself, however. I've had managers who have let me run with my own ideas and have praised me for leading projects and working closely with various areas of the business, and I've also been fired because my manager couldn't stand the fact I wasn't willing to be his slave and work on another of his (soon to be cancelled) projects.

In many tech companies who only care about end of the line results, it's simply not enough to do a good job. You have to do a good job on something that actually matters. When you're up for promotion, you're up against other people who have done a good job at things that have mattered, and the quantification being done is how much of these good things matter when compared to one another.

It's really a shame in this case that it seems like the OP was really stuck under very poor management who clearly didn't know what they were doing.

If Google holds it engineers to results, why doesn't it let them at least decide what they get to work on? It seems they've forgotten the part that if you're going to decouple someone's direct management influence, you need to decouple that manager's ability to assign that person work or dictate what projects he or she works on. Just goes to show even at a company like Google they don't have everything figured out...

</comment><comment><USER162> Sounds like the same shit management at most places I've worked. Not surprising in the least though.

Everything to the sister company in India!

</comment><comment><USER163> Teams are spontaneously disbanded and their projects are moved to other countries because it prevents people who share the same allegiance or ideology that runs counter to Google's from conspiring to hide "accidental" exploitable bugs in the code which could later be used to damage the company. The project gets audited by the next team's fresh eyes and if an exploit is found then it is patched and can be traced back to the moles who can then be monitored or fired. Rinse and repeat until launch.

</comment><comment><USER164> In this thread.....we b.itch & moan about office jobs.</comment>