the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading:
A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like:
> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.
We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.
It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes.
This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America
I know it's topical, but I really don't think the working class on America is pissed because they are struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem; or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning bracket.
I don't know about America, but keep in mind that having an income which is a large number doesn't necessarily mean you have tonnes of wealth (in most general sense of the word), due to cost of living. In my country, you could be in the top 5% of earners and still not be automatically set or life or anything like that, because tax and housing is so bloody expensive it's ridiculous. Even on $200k+ you're still stuck at that job for a decade or more to afford a low-to-mid tier house/apartment, unless you have generational wealth. No, you won't be homeless, which is a lot to be thankful for, but you're still pretty locked in to being a wage minion. In my country, I reckon the top 5% earning is more like where the average should be, in order for the average person to have a decent life.
Being “stuck” at a job for a decade, living a life with zero financial worries, does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore.
Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.
> does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore. Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.
The parent was talking about their country, not the USA.
Yall are missing the point and reading what you want to read. I am quite aware of the perspective. There are people on the streets in my city because the median income is $70k and the median house is $1.5M. They are thoroughly screwed by the system. My point is not to garner sympathy for the top earners. My point is that almost all of us are earning far below what we should when you look at the grand scheme of things. The war is not between the average man on the street and the average man at a tech company. It's deeper than that.
I think I see what you’re saying, and I agree with you that the wealth inequality between the ultra rich and everyone else is the real challenge. The tech worker with a Google salary is a lot closer to a homeless man on the street than he is to the true 1% in the US, and that’s a real problem.
That depends on how you live your life. Most of the people who are making even the top 1% of the salaries in the US are probably not set for life. They could be if they quit immediately and moved to Vietnam maybe, but otherwise their cash is probably locked up in a house or spent on things like their car or school for their kids.
What does "set for life" mean? If you're earning $788,000 per year (top 1%), there are many places you can live and be set for life in the US, or even in the state one is currently living in after working for a few years.
Obviously you won't be set for life at any income level if you spend money as quickly as you earn it - hedonic treadmill and all - but there is an income level sufficient to meet all of ones needs, and the rest can be saved and invested.
Rule of thumb is: if you can barely afford the lifestyle you have with an income, you probably can't maintain the same lifestyle without an income.
People who make $700k a year generally do not live in a way that makes it possible for them to retire at 30. Usually they’re aiming for 50+ or even 65 like everyone else, which of course means they both are spending more than someone making $70k but also their requirements when they retire are more. If they let go of the latter they could in fact be “set for life” sooner but it’s typically not the case that someone is capable of doing that suddenly. You have to plan for it over years and decades even then.
I worked in big tech in one of the coastal cities. Most of my coworkers, although great people, were delusional in terms of money. I was getting paid between 200k to 400k during my tenure, and after working there a few years, I was set for life.
Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas", typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably didn't actually save that much money, because they had such expensive lifestyles.
I agree with that most tech workers are delusional about money. Yet I still disagree with being the set for life, in my area.
Out of curiosity, what are the tax rates and housing prices where you are?
In my area, the maths would work something like this. Let's say $400k income (extremely high for my city). After tax, more like $200k. Rent might be $30k, plus other costs, let's be generous and say $40k total. That comes out around $160k savings per year. Lets say you work there for 5 years (which IMO is a long time at the start of your career), that's $800k. Median house is $1.5M. You could probably buy a substandard apartment and be back to 0 savings.
Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it better than what everyone else is getting? Absolutely. But I don't think it's exactly "set for life" given you've achieved pretty bare minimum...
What I've also found is there's a correlation between people in tech who don't seem to care about money, and having already started from wealth. Oh, how are you saving so much money? Right, you live in your parents' second house... How did you afford that apartment? Oh, your parents paid for half of it... (For added effect, add in a rich partner too.) Etc etc. Strip away generational/systematic wealth and even at the top of the layperson ladder, you're barely getting anywhere.
> Yet I still disagree with being the set for life, in my area
I think this might be the root of the difference in perspective. Very few people can be set for life maintaining a lifestyle only just afforded by their income. You may have to move to a cheaper neighborhood or less costly metroplex, and perhaps not buy a new car as frequently. But you won't have to work a day again
Maybe not when you put it that way, but small businesses used to be a larger share of the economy and a more viable "rags to riches" path than they are today. The system is undoubtedly rigged to favor large businesses - most people understand that intuitively but the anti-trust cases the government is currently prosecuting and in many cases winning are hard evidence of how the US really punted on protecting the small businesses from the big ones over the last few decades. You aren't going to find many people in the working class who disagree with the idea that big corporations should be cut down to size and we should have an economic system that's friendlier to people who want to be their own boss.
Small businesses are no less viable than ever. Read some historical BLS and SBA stats, SUSB at Census.gov, or pretty much any proper place that tracks historical businesses data.
There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires.
Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean millions of people are not succeeding.
Side of the same coin. Salaryman earning millions are still salaryman. You're bounded to the whims of the employer, and can lose it all from the ups and down of the personal relationships that surround you. The American dream is not the rich employee, is moving out to that relationship and build something you own.
Building something that is bounded to the marked at large and can weather the individual change of whims is increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and more value in every corner of the market.
The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a working class increasingly repressed, at ever income bracket.
The “salaryman lifestyle” necessitates low wages. It’s a “lifestyle” because you can’t quit it. You make barely enough money to sustain your family, so that you’re forced to keep working against your will.
If you’re making millions of dollars, you’re not a salaryman. You’re making a choice to sell your labor, but you can always quit and the impact to your livelihood will be minimal.
It's not the dollar values so much as the incentive structure.
I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.
When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.
When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it.
>Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system
not great
>and then whether you listen to your manager.
I mean that's part of the job, no?
I'm sure the system isn't perfect, but I was a wee programmer back in the day when it was way more common for MBA types to be managing programmers, the idea that solid technical skills might get you promoted to the compensation of what a director might make was almost unheared of.
G's sytem of promo isn't perfect, it emphasizes the wrong things, but it's forward progress in the long run.
Your attempt to sow a divide among people by labeling them the derogatory "elites" in line with GOP talking points isn't helpful here.
If you want to ground this conversation in facts, here's a few for you to chew on:
1. Someone earning $500k/year TC still has far more in common with someone earning $80k or even $50k when you compare them against people with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who control capital.
2. Someone earning $500k in a vhcol area like the Bay Area still likely cannot afford what historically was considered a "nice" home in a "nice" neighborhood without years of saving up when those homes cost $3M+.
3. Someone earning that may not necessarily be wealthy and be largely dependent on their ability to continue receiving a paycheck compared to those with true wealth who can take loans against like billionaires.
The reality is, someone earning that much is likely financially comfortable where a major disaster likely won't bankrupt them, and can likely afford reasonable housing for a family, and retire one day. That is more than most of America for sure right now and that sucks, but it absolutely does not make them "elite" and it speaks volumes of the efficacy of the GOP propaganda machine that you and so many others think that.
20% down on a 3 million dollar home is $600k. If they can't save that much in 5 years making $500k/yr, dare I say they're really not trying hard enough? say you only see half of that 500k after taxes (which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in). $250k/yr - saving $120k, still gives you $130k post-tax,
or $10,800/month to rent, pay for groceries, utilities, fuel, retirement, entertainment, everything else.
People are living on half that,
if not less. $3,000/month? $2,000? Saying that $500k doesn't go very far just because they have to have the $3,000,000+ house isn't likely to garner much sympathy.
Oh no, it's going to take a couple of years to save up for the down payment on a $3 million house. How about not making enough to be able to save for a down payment on any house in the prime parts of the Bay Area!
$500k/yr is enough to buy a lot of luxuries that are denied to those making $50k/yr, and it's stupid to try and deny it.
But that's simple jealousy. Some software person at Google writing ad software isn't the one that moved manufacturing jobs out of America, nor do they have the power to bring them back. They can't vote on a tarrifs or fund a stimulus in Congress to help American workers. They don't set public policy at all. The best they can do at stealing from the government is to cheat a bit on their taxes, or be a NIMBY after they've bought that house.
I agree with you in general, but this part is off:
> which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in
Stock that a company gives you as compensation is treated as ordinary income at the time it vests, based on the value when it vests. If your total comp is $250k salary + $1M in stock over four years, and the stock value stays flat, your taxes are the same as if you got $500k in salary each year (a bit worse, actually, because of the first year vesting all at once making your income $250k and then $750k); if it doubles the day after your grant and stays flat after that, your taxes are the same as if you got $750k in salary each year. Long-term capital gains only apply to increases in stock value after it vests - not any different than if you sold your company stock immediately and bought another stock.
Good point! You're totally right, assuming they're RSUs, which they probably are.
There are more exotic situations where they aren't, and also there are ESPPs (employee stock purchase program) which are also different though that's not a grant, but I don't want to rathole on stock option grant stuff here.
I did "reasonably" well for a couple decades and then I did, if not spectacularly, well for a decade+ that certainly set me up for retirement. And I might have even retired earlier absent COVIVD. Not spectacular sums but certainly reasonable amounts given owning a house and modest travel sums.
You really shouldn't quit Google if your plan is to get rich. You should quit if you don't care too much about money and want more interesting work than being a cog in a lucrative machine.
Yeah. Google or any of the big techs are the lowest risk paths to economic stability and independence. Anyone with the ability to work on one should absolutely take it.
Those who have the ability to take such a path often have other paths available to them that they can take with more risk–because the low risk path is always available to them as a fallback.
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
That has always been the case. If anything, software development opened up a brand new avenue for people to get rich other than stuffy “elite” colleges that feed into NYC/Chicago/Boston into finance/law/medicine.
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
I mean getting a job as a SWE at Google is hardly a good strategy if you don't enjoy writing software. But yes once you're there is very hard to justify doing anything else, there's a reason why they call them "golden handcuffs".
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-capitalists would be better off joining the working class instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't have the financial means to build their own company, is relegated to a sub-par quality of life.
I would bet a substantial sum that Tesla was insolvent early in the m3. They suddenly were firing people all over the place and not paying many vendors, and paying others quite late. Additionally, the finance pros kept quitting right then....
I think it went bk, but Musk bet that he could hype up the stock enough to raise cash in the next offering and then pretend it never happened...
There is no guarantee of success. There is a lot of luck involved.
Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during nights and weekend and then founded his company.
(Not saying it for this person, as I don't know), but there is a case also where you can be a very average performer, just hiding in a large corporation (or retiring, as some people even say), then you will be very well paid, and highly considered. Then once you leave to create your own projects or join a small start-up, reality hits.
Ain't this the truth. So many mediocre people hide in a giant company, learn how to hit their kpis and think they're crushing it, but get smacked in the face by reality when they leave.
My experience at a small company is that I always feel mediocre :)
I thought once I reached Staff at Google it would go away. It in fact made it even worse now that I have a whole slate of incredible peers to compare myself to.
Incorrect. In fact YC’s (i.e. the website you’re on) whole thesis is that it’s a lot easier to found a business successfully than most people imagine. Yeah, they’ve drifted from their roots a little but I think it’s been proved out.
Interesting, but I don't get it. Are you saying people aren't scared of having babies even though they can randomly give birth to an ant or an elephant?
> It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.
I love the part of the story in which a guy in a windbreaker knocks on his door on Sunday morning and tells him that he has to come with him since a sprinkler popped in his office.
I know really few people that can write such relatable and honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years now. Great inspiration source
I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc).
With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value.
Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.
> the most important lesson of any career: The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by "process".
In short, your real customers are not even people anymore, they are a process.
Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help people is the sweet spot in both career and society.
From the Fine Article:
"Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions."
>I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.
Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.
Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite.
So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise).
See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.
The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.
I find it super sad that we should teach kids how to climb corporate ladders rather than taking control of their life, starting businesses, making the world a better place or chasing a career of fulfilment rather than maximizing money return.
Agreed. Every kid their senior year of high school should be forming an LLC, starting a company around their idea, learning the basic skills to operate one, if they want to graduate.
I sometimes can't even detect sarcasm on HN anymore. What 16-18 year old kid (or their parents) has the capital and time to start and run their own business? Even when they're adults, they likely will not have access to business ownership. Depending on the source you use, somewhere between 5 and 10% of Americans own their own business. I'm not saying basic business skills aren't valuable--they are, but the vast, vast majority of people will work for someone else throughout their careers. Shouldn't we be optimizing education for the 90% case?
You and I have a fundamentally different view about how to optimize education. Your view is probably great to cover the base case of people “checking out” of their children’s education, but my individualized view doesn’t care about the 90% but the child in front of me.
I’d also posit that this approach to education reduces overall attainment by dulling the edge of what the margin is capable of.
You could make it work if this "everyone forms an LLC in school" initiative comes with "everyone gets a chunk of cash to invest into this business". I assume the time would come from restructuring curriculums so that half of your senior year is spent on this project. Maybe add another year onto high school instead that is the Business Year.
This would also require a massive increase in the amount of money going into schools so it's pretty much a non-starter in the US.
As to "optimizing for the 90%", I feel like there's probably a lot of interesting differences in a world where every high school graduate has been in a boss' shoes. Possibly bosses would be able to get away with a lot less shady shit. This probably doesn't help the chances of setting it up either.
I did not care for the performance review practices at Apple (and it is probably similar in every other big corporation).
We'll give you a 1 to 3 rating in three categories (it's been a while, something like: "Expertise", "Innovation", "Teamwork"). A "1" means you did not meet expectations, a "2" means you met expectations and a "3" means you exceeded expectations.
If we give you a "1" in anything, you should probably start to look for a job elsewhere.
We can't give you a "3" in two of the categories above however. Well, we can but then we have to go up the management chain — perhaps even to the director — because giving someone a "3" in more than one category means we have to raise your "grade". And moving up a grade is a Big Deal. We can only have so many top-tier engineers.
Oh, and regardless of what your manager thinks of you, all managers have to report to their manager for what we call a "leveling session". Here your manager needs to defend their choices when compensating their direct reports in front of all the other managers and of course their boss as well.
Something in particular we're looking to make sure of is that your manager rewards some of their direct-reports with bonuses, a raise, etc. but "punishes" others. Egalitarianism is frowned upon.
> the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers
This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics.
It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet.
We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get recognition for it.
Above a certain company size however I think what he’s describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person company you’ve very close to the company. In a > 10k person company there’s no way: there’s a lot of layers to the company and often can’t “touch” the customer as an employee. The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact: you can’t reduce that complexity out of it.
And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy.
But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want.
And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.
> And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy.
This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.
And it is working generally very well if you compare GCP and Azure. DX is much better at GCP but Azure does stuff that companies care much better and is 2x bigger.
MS offers bundle deals to managers who eat that up like a 1980’s TV wife bragging about how she “saved” the family $300 by buying $1000 of shit they didn’t need.
It’s been their schtick practically from the beginning.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used that financial stability to do something high risk which most people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)
> author seems like they were only there for a promotion
It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.
This is not true. Google is so large that I'm definitely willing to believe that there are parts where people are like this, but I found that people generally did not care about my level and while there are many docs/slides about how to get promoted it was largely oriented towards helping people advocate effectively for themselves and was not "thou shall be promoted".
There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
> There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful work in such an environment.
The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.
An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.
I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.
But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.
Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.
There's different kinds of customers for different kinds of bureaucracies though.
However, it looks like the people working at L4 for Google are being handled no differently by HR than assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies. Better pay for more people than most of the old guard, but why can't they do this part of it with some ingenuity.
>The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period
At least factory workers know this is not going to happen from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time ago.
You would think Google was built from a different foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost like they didn't know any better.
Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion of the output of people who never got promoted.
Financially, if you were going to invest in people, that would make them the better investment than those who did get promoted :\
It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it, but you could probably tell how high-performance the unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any money or not any more, and how much.
Now what about the people who could never get hired at Google or places like that to begin with?
If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the sky's the limit !
You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at corporate climbing :)
I will second what the parent poster says, people definitely cared about levels in the teams I was on (2016-2021). Sometimes people would talk about other engineers using only their level. E.g. "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" or my manager introducing new teammates by saying "we have a new L5 joining the team". This seemed normal to a lot of people at Google, but since I have worked at other places where someone's level almost never comes up in any conversation I always found it a little concerning.
So like I said, I definitely believe that it happened, but I didn't see it and I have a hard time believing it was the norm. I was there 2016-2022. Also the "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" person sounds like a bit of a dick.
In my humble experience some time between 2006-8 and 2013. Unless they hid it that well from us interns.
It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.
This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes one can guess.
Yes, the last few years there has been a big push to try to hide levels, don't celebrate promos as publicly, etc, but the overall you can't overnight change (if ever) a culture that has been built for two decades around this concept.
My experience: initially, I learned a lot of new things, I was excited to work for a big famous company. But eventually, it started to be less fun and more stressful. There's an endless push for impact or to improve some questionable metrics, while technical debt is building up. Also there's always uncertainty about reorgs and layoffs. Lots of anxiety related to the next evaluation cycle.
After a few years, I can say money is probably my main driver. Although, I don't want to get promoted because I certainly don't want more stress. I want to stay in this company as long as possible because I will be very hard to earn more money elsewhere.
I would be very discouraged if the people who set tech strategy at my company were the ones who had passed me on the promo ladder by not writing any tests and refusing to go to interviews or help their team fix bugs.
Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20 an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't you enjoy software engineering?
My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.
Actually, that varies from person to person. I've been fine not being promoted (less time doing the self-reporting monkey-dance leaves more time to work on projects), and I make enough to satisfy my material needs and desires. And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire. There's just the work and the chance of a cash-out (or of changing the world, whatever gets you up in the morning).
> And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire.
This is something I'd assumed every engineer-type person faces sooner or later. Unless you're in a massive corp with hundreds of engineers, there's only maybe two or three tiers of engineering roles. That's two promotions, ever, unless you want to be promoted out of engineering and into management. So if you want to stay technical, instead of chasing higher status job titles, you have to chase higher status projects.
It's less about comparing to your ancestors, more your peers in other industries. If you're getting payed say $40/h, that's muuuuch more than most other jobs, and can give you a comfortable living for quite a while.
I agree human psychology is part of it and can help explain someone's mentality, but I don't think human psychology can fully justify someone's behaviour, since humans aren't automatons beholden to their psychology.
That's a good point, but I don't believe it scales at the same rate -- meaning I believe the salaries are much higher than the living costs.
Eg average us salary is probably somewhere around 60k. Let's say single bedroom apartment not in SF is maybe like 1.5k/mo, that leaves like 42k left over.
Google salary I would guess is closer to 150k (low end probably); SF single bedroom is probably closer to 4k/mo, that leaves 102k. Big difference, and note the ratio here isn't as important as the absolute value. You live a very different life with 102k than with 42k.
And also note wealth doesn't really increase linearly with how much money you have, it tends to be more than linear, because people with lots of money are more comfortable investing large chunks of it, which further increases their wealth.
Internally most larger tech companies index their salary bands based on the CoL of the employee. The downturn over the last couple years has had many companies move reqs from high CoL areas to low CoL areas to save money.
IME of Big Cos, it is never cost of living that is taken into account, but what "the competition" in the local market are paying, and then some percentile of that.
Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the company is targeting. So they claim it is open and transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential sorry")
This is how you end up with situations like London, which is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g. transport, food etc).
London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural World Capital and attracts loads of people from across the world so there is more competition for tech/high-skilled roles because so many people move to London after they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower but everything else is more expensive due to population density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in Zurich so there are less people competing for each job, so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and understandably plan to leave after a few years.
Agree and not only that, Google attracts a certain type of person that I feel like is more competitive and slightly obsessed with self image (senior role titles for example)
It's a little more than that. At the level this engineer was at, they are expected to seek and attain promotion. Sitting at a level below staff becomes a negative and can lead to you being put on a PIP because you aren't meeting the declared expectations when you aren't being promoted.
Google eventually removed that language because they learned that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough room in the pyramid and they'll lose the people who are doing the keeping-the-lights-on work who don't self-promote. They didn't know that yet in 2018 if memory serves.
Straight out of school, yes. With a few years of outside experience and an advanced degree, it is easy to join at L5. Which I think is ideal, no promotion headaches, just focus on interesting work (L6 already starts to be management heavy, so not that attractive).
Yes switching jobs is often a path to "sideways promotion". You have to interview well, but that's something that's learnable - and more under your control in a way, than getting good promotable projects at your current employer.
> the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?
Based on Blind and personal experience, the vast majority of people in big tech are literally doing that. It’s probably the most used carrot used by management in those companies too, so hard to blame them
I know more than a handful of folks who are very happy with their level of responsibility and comp, and don't want higher expectations and more stress even if it would bring in significantly more cash. I personally think that's a pretty healthy way to look at it. Not everything in life is about money.
Fairly sure Google has/had a cliff for engineers to reach senior by a certain time frame. That puts immense pressure to get promoted, or you get laid off.
It's no longer senior, it's only L4 (new hires are usually L3). Also I never knew the time length for the cliff, but I think it was really, really long.
It also wasn't, as far as I know, every strictly enforced. There were folks when I joined (which was when the L5 requirement still existed, but it was in its way out) who had been L4 for like a decade.
Right, while there was a "growth" expectation for L4s written into the SWE job ladder, there were no fixed timelines. Enforcement varied from org to org: at least one of my previous orgs periodically conducted talent reviews, specifically looking at cases like long-tenured L4s to decide whether to intervene.
That was before the layoffs started. One of my by then ex-reports, who was a very talented and knowledgeable but not at all career-focused long-time L4s got laid off in one of the rounds. :(
Not just Google - I haven't seen many companies which would tolerate people being stuck on junior level for many years. They'd be slowly managed out (unless the company is government or really big).
Forgive me if I seem presumptuous in my advice here. You've done things in your career that I can only dream of doing. What I can say is that I've somehow managed to survive a quarter-century in a string of Big Tech companies without dropping out (yet).
It sounds like you may have been looking at the currents and picking the one that seemed best one to swim in. I found there's often -- but not always -- another option: build a dam. In other words, change it up. Alter the landscape. Seek to change the business in a way that nobody's been willing/able to do before. Looking back at my career I found I was happiest and most successful when I was able to tell my boss what I was doing vs. waiting for my boss to tell me to do something interesting/impactful/etc.
When that option doesn't seem to be presenting itself, it's probably time to move on. But I've found it's often worth giving it a try first.
A couple of times I needed to earn the right to create my own destiny by pushing through some grunge work, but once I established a degree of trust with my management chain, that was capital I could "cash in on" by proposing something big, new, and interesting. It never ceases to amaze me to see how boldness often gets rewarded. I just saw a co-worker of mine draw blood from a stone (funding-wise) by proposing something ambitious and controversial last week. Suddenly they're a TL of a new team this week. They've built a reputation for "just getting it done," so management has confidence in their ability to execute and drive results.
Whenever I'm starting to feel stuck in a rut, that's when I open a blank document and start hammering out a design for something new. I'm not even thinking about promotion when I do that. But somehow, somewhere down the road, either a promotion or a bigger opportunity with another company has always come of it.
Context for others: steelframe and I were teammates at Microsoft in the late 2000s.[0]
Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!
This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't have time to think of the best projects for me.
I probably would have been better off figuring out my own high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-term fires that kept popping up for my team.
In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.
Can you explain how this doesn’t amount to saying “You seem like you’re brave. There’s another option: be a coward.”
You don’t seem to be proposing an alternative strategy with equivalent risk/reward dynamics, rather, it seems like what amounts to anathema to entrepreneurship.
I saw your post about selling TinyPilot, congratulations! FWIW I agree with all your points in your 2018 article, and I wish I had left Google sooner too.
I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it :-).
No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing target that has a good bug bounty program.
My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish the book I've been promising to write for the past four years.[0]
I've been following your story for the past several years since you wrote this post and it helped me understand the realities of indie hacking and startups more than most articles, so thanks for writing in public and documenting your journey, I'm sure I'm not the only one you helped. By the way, whenever I see your username, I always seem to read it as Mount Lynch, haha.
I don't have anything useful to add but just want to say, like many others have said, I really appreciate the way you have continued to document your journey from start to today and not shied away from sharing details. Thank you for that!
Nice to see you on HN :-) Too bad we couldn’t reach a deal on your Keto site, but hopefully the new owner takes care of it well. Can’t wait to see what you will do next! Cheers!
I was 32 and single, so I had a lot of freedom to take the risk at that point.
I don't want to say my exact net worth at the time, but I earmarked $400k to last me five years of trying to make it on my own.
$400k was kind of extreme because I assumed I'd maintain the lifestyle I had at Google, including my $4.2k/mo apartment in downtown Manhattan. I ended up moving to Western Massachusetts, where my burn rate was significantly lower and could have been even lower if I rented an apartment instead of buying a house.
The conclusion I took away from this piece is just how heartless it is to depend on a promotion committee. I know Google put them in place because they wanted an Engineering-driven culture where people could do great Engineering work and still be recognized, even if their manager didn't. But it sure doesn't sound like these promotion committees are recognizing great Engineering work, especially when that work falls under difficult-to-quantify cultural improvements.
Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders, etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional working relationships with colleagues.
Exactly. There are non-monetary rewards to doing good work: esprit de corps from a team of coworkers you like and respect, satisfaction and pride in your craft, positive responses from users, and so on.
For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only to find that the prize is: more pies. It’s fine to recognize that your interests and your employer’s are only loosely aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you to.
Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.”
I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them ended up building life style business because the markets of their ideas were actually much smaller.
If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.
Screw promotion. I just want a job that provides intrinsic motivation (meaningful, inspiring work; Flow), and pays enough for me to make ends meet and to save reasonably.
There are three problems:
- many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted);
- meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right;
- most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation.
Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.
Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google".
And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.
What sounded like the usual Google-internal-self-congratulatory-echo-chamber nonsense grated on me, too, but I kept reading, and was glad I did, because the article didn't go like the usual.
They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.
2017-2022 I would've said the Ethereum foundation and various DeFi startups. If you look at what Ethereum accomplished with proof of stake, it's quite remarkable. The game theory alone for proof of stake is thorny as hell, and then they built a working secure implementation and upgraded a distributed network of unaffiliated organizations who all voluntarily run nodes, all without major hitches or anyone's funds being lost. That's huge, and more impressive than anything Google's done in the last 5 years.
Since 2022, I would probably say the various LLM owners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, etc. The complexity here isn't in the basic transformer architecture though (which was invented by Google in 2017), but in the data infrastructure that hoovered up all the data on the web to train it on, as well as the fine-tuning on various use-cases.
Not surprisingly, good engineers follow the money: these have also been the lucrative industries in those time periods.
It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get carelessly tossed from one project to another without any consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world, and eating the free-est food in the world" (and probably being paid quite handsomely as well) is not enough for happiness, unless there is also promotion involved.
This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks that my project desperately needs me to get done.
I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.
1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere).
2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.
I know at my last job I closed any resumes that had Google on them. They generally didn’t do well at startups in my opinion, the scope and responsibilities are too broad and there is no where to hide. And the ones I did hire tended to want to make everything look the way it did at Google.
That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge number of software employees, that it seems unwise to draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine has been a much smaller sample size than the total that you've personally worked with.
exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something that is completely not applicable here.
I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.
Smaller companies need to outbid Google for talent, especially if they carry less stability. I imagine there are quite many who went like: leaves Google for great cash package at smaller company/start up -> smaller company goes belly up -> go back to FAANG
> Your manager doesn’t promote you?
> No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports.
They don’t even get a vote.
> Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.
It used to be that you would put together your promo packet, which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that decides whether or not you get promoted.
Technically yes, but "promo committee" has also changed to be your immediate org instead of being independent. Which makes your promo more dependent on your manager's influence.
No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference between before and now is that before, your manager was expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager is expected not to be an advocate, but to provide their balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).
The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.
The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.
The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.
Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.
I know it changes every year so I don't let my own personal experience color my perception of Google 2024, but some years when I was there my manager barely even knew where my desk was. My promo packets for L5 and L6 were judged by peer committees and I am not sure they even saw my manager evaluations. When I sat on an L5 promo committee we did not weigh manager assessments. This made sense at that time because of how hands-off managers were in the realm of the reasons a person could get promoted to L5.
These days it's the manager who writes the next-level assessment (NLA) and it's the NLA that forms the main body of the packet that the promo committee looks at. They're also the one soliciting and summarizing peer feedback etc.
That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade. I hope the current managers are up to the job! Most of my managers didn't have even the slightest inkling of how to evaluate what I was doing on the job. One of them was mainly occupied with running the "mindfulness" office.
> That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade
Yes, there have been some very signficant changes over the last few years. Promos are decided in-org. Managers play a much more important role. There are promo quotas along with associated pressures (felt more acutely in some orgs compared to others).
But, putting that asides, a manager who doesn't have any idea of what or how their reports are doing is clearly failing at their job under any of those systems.
Most large tech companies require the manager to write some sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee. But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent. This is quite rare and a neat feature.
In theory, yes. In practice, it would take some pretty extraordinary circumstances for one to get promoted without their manager's support.
For starters, even if it is the candidate themselves who self-nominate, it is still the manager who writes the promo readiness assessment that forms the main body of the packet. It is also the manager's job to solicit peer feedback and represent it to the committee.
One could imagine a scenario where the manager's opinion diverges sharply from the assessment of the session lead and other senior folks sitting on the committee (who decide collectively) but again, those would be some pretty exceptional circumstances...
Layered on top of this are promo quotas, which already mean that some folks who do tick all the boxes aren't getting promoted as soon as they would be otherwise (or at all). That is to say that there are lots of headwinds even if the manager is supportive, let alone when they aren't.
Funny enough, optimizing for promotion is not only a common strategy among individual contributors but is also encourage by mgmt. During my single year at Google I collaborated with a guy from a different team. His strategy was to do most of the meaningful (measureable) work on his own. Fair enough, I don't care. But he didn't predict that the project can be reassign. At that was exactly what happened. When I ask product manager why, he said that this is normal practice, credits should go to the product owning team.
When discussed such situations with other googlers two separate views emerge: either you're new and you exploit the system as is or "It's not the same google any more". Funny fact that we still think about that old google when it comes to culture, work, ppl, etc.
Sadly the chosen metric can be subject to politics. You’ll find stakeholders have their pet metric, claim another stakeholders metric doesn’t measure what’s important, or a new, important person thinks all the metrics are garbage and need to be changed.
I’ve had successful projects hit their metrics and those have also gotten caught up in politics.
I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this:
> The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data.
I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion?
I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone.
> My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice.
Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy.
The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work".
Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.
I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion.
My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.
I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale.
I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.
> My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.
oh wow. Reading this made me realize why (in the context of a big tech career) it's such a good idea to have a mentor whose reasonably far away from your team. They could have probably pointed this out to you early.
Yeah, I found a mentor at the beginning of year 4, and they were very helpful. There were a lot of things happening on my team that I didn't understand, and my mentor was able to recognize them as political patterns that were somewhat common.
I realize I maybe came across as naive thinking that I could get promoted without thinking much about career strategy or politics, but that's how the first few years of my career had worked out.
After undergrad, I worked for Microsoft for three years, and I got promoted twice without ever thinking about career. I just did the projects my team needed, and did a good job. Same thing when I worked for NCC group: promoted after a year and was on track for more.
One of the big differences in other companies was that they gave me opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in my day to day work rather than needing to see me launch something big and shiny. I invested a lot into peer reviews and building repeatable processes, so managers at those companies were able to see that impact my team even if it would be hard to prove measurable results to an external promo committee.
That TinyPilot is really cool. It deserves to take off. I'm surprised he's still bootstrapping at this point, because with a product like that, there's a lot more to gain than there is to lose by taking angel and VC money.
I actually sold the company earlier this year.[0] I never looked into VC money primarily because I like the independence of being the sole owner, though I agree there would have been a lot of advantages.
“I quit myself to work for Google” is the most common pattern but not as much spoken about. We can see the side effects of it in posts like these and countless others that come with forced contraptions as ways to justify having quit Google.
When I worked as a post doc, I wasn’t paid much but I got a direct return on extra work: another paper etc. when I got my first job as a data scientist, I was paid much more but there was seemingly little response to extra work. It was distressing. But later I learned that making a good impression on people would pay off long term, through recommendations for new jobs etc.
I know this article is about Google's culture and the author is a strong developer, but it reminds me of conversations with junior developers at other companies. I've worked with a lot of junior folks that think they should be a "senior" 2 years out of their undergrad CS courses. After all, fixing some tests independently fullfills the "leads complex projects" box on the leveling chart.
That’s the guy who created TinyPilot. Since then he wrote yearly articles about it’s IndieHacker journey. Some of them have been shared on HN. Worth reading!
It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the visibility of the organisation. The author also sounds like he went 'off books' a bit helping out on things they were interested in, rather than what was on jira boards or whatever their sponsor cared about. You'll get punished for this in a lot of places, it's just how it is. Management need to see what you are doing.
Let me try a short reply: if the manager needs to see what somebody is doing, he hast to look at it. Not look KPIs and metrics.
KPI and easy metrics are for lazy bad managers.
I already mentioned above, direct managers don't have organisational visibility and can't decide among the hundreds who should be promoted and who shouldn't. The promotion request needs to go some central forum with objective criteria. This is not to say your manager can't represent you vigorously to this forum.
Working with the promise of a future promotion is, effectively, giving credit to your employer.
"In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist."
- Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.
Congratulations, OP learned about "we expect loyalty and effort from you, but you won't get any from us", which is 99.5% of all companies out there. I hope OP does well on their own and don't have to work in this kind of disingenuous places in the future.
Yes, one would think if this community actually valued VC activities they would be praising the author for forging his own way and starting companies rather than tearing him down for choosing not to take the easy way and suckling on googles teets.
the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading:
https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/
https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like:
> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.
We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.
It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes.
This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America
I know it's topical, but I really don't think the working class on America is pissed because they are struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem; or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning bracket.
I don't know about America, but keep in mind that having an income which is a large number doesn't necessarily mean you have tonnes of wealth (in most general sense of the word), due to cost of living. In my country, you could be in the top 5% of earners and still not be automatically set or life or anything like that, because tax and housing is so bloody expensive it's ridiculous. Even on $200k+ you're still stuck at that job for a decade or more to afford a low-to-mid tier house/apartment, unless you have generational wealth. No, you won't be homeless, which is a lot to be thankful for, but you're still pretty locked in to being a wage minion. In my country, I reckon the top 5% earning is more like where the average should be, in order for the average person to have a decent life.
Being “stuck” at a job for a decade, living a life with zero financial worries, does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore.
Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.
> does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore. Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.
The parent was talking about their country, not the USA.
I’m not familiar with any country where this pattern is untrue. From Canada and USA, to Brazil, France, and Japan.
Yall are missing the point and reading what you want to read. I am quite aware of the perspective. There are people on the streets in my city because the median income is $70k and the median house is $1.5M. They are thoroughly screwed by the system. My point is not to garner sympathy for the top earners. My point is that almost all of us are earning far below what we should when you look at the grand scheme of things. The war is not between the average man on the street and the average man at a tech company. It's deeper than that.
I think I see what you’re saying, and I agree with you that the wealth inequality between the ultra rich and everyone else is the real challenge. The tech worker with a Google salary is a lot closer to a homeless man on the street than he is to the true 1% in the US, and that’s a real problem.
The top 1% are closer to a homeless person on the street than they are to the top 0.1%.
The wealth inequality in the US is the underlying fracture in the social compact that is driving the populist politics that are at play.
That depends on how you live your life. Most of the people who are making even the top 1% of the salaries in the US are probably not set for life. They could be if they quit immediately and moved to Vietnam maybe, but otherwise their cash is probably locked up in a house or spent on things like their car or school for their kids.
What does "set for life" mean? If you're earning $788,000 per year (top 1%), there are many places you can live and be set for life in the US, or even in the state one is currently living in after working for a few years.
Obviously you won't be set for life at any income level if you spend money as quickly as you earn it - hedonic treadmill and all - but there is an income level sufficient to meet all of ones needs, and the rest can be saved and invested.
Rule of thumb is: if you can barely afford the lifestyle you have with an income, you probably can't maintain the same lifestyle without an income.
People who make $700k a year generally do not live in a way that makes it possible for them to retire at 30. Usually they’re aiming for 50+ or even 65 like everyone else, which of course means they both are spending more than someone making $70k but also their requirements when they retire are more. If they let go of the latter they could in fact be “set for life” sooner but it’s typically not the case that someone is capable of doing that suddenly. You have to plan for it over years and decades even then.
I worked in big tech in one of the coastal cities. Most of my coworkers, although great people, were delusional in terms of money. I was getting paid between 200k to 400k during my tenure, and after working there a few years, I was set for life.
Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas", typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably didn't actually save that much money, because they had such expensive lifestyles.
I agree with that most tech workers are delusional about money. Yet I still disagree with being the set for life, in my area.
Out of curiosity, what are the tax rates and housing prices where you are?
In my area, the maths would work something like this. Let's say $400k income (extremely high for my city). After tax, more like $200k. Rent might be $30k, plus other costs, let's be generous and say $40k total. That comes out around $160k savings per year. Lets say you work there for 5 years (which IMO is a long time at the start of your career), that's $800k. Median house is $1.5M. You could probably buy a substandard apartment and be back to 0 savings. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it better than what everyone else is getting? Absolutely. But I don't think it's exactly "set for life" given you've achieved pretty bare minimum...
What I've also found is there's a correlation between people in tech who don't seem to care about money, and having already started from wealth. Oh, how are you saving so much money? Right, you live in your parents' second house... How did you afford that apartment? Oh, your parents paid for half of it... (For added effect, add in a rich partner too.) Etc etc. Strip away generational/systematic wealth and even at the top of the layperson ladder, you're barely getting anywhere.
> Yet I still disagree with being the set for life, in my area
I think this might be the root of the difference in perspective. Very few people can be set for life maintaining a lifestyle only just afforded by their income. You may have to move to a cheaper neighborhood or less costly metroplex, and perhaps not buy a new car as frequently. But you won't have to work a day again
At $300k, your "cost of living" argument falls apart pretty much everywhere in the US.
Even at $200k, only NYC/SF are so expensive that cost of living changes are meaningful.
Maybe not when you put it that way, but small businesses used to be a larger share of the economy and a more viable "rags to riches" path than they are today. The system is undoubtedly rigged to favor large businesses - most people understand that intuitively but the anti-trust cases the government is currently prosecuting and in many cases winning are hard evidence of how the US really punted on protecting the small businesses from the big ones over the last few decades. You aren't going to find many people in the working class who disagree with the idea that big corporations should be cut down to size and we should have an economic system that's friendlier to people who want to be their own boss.
Small businesses are no less viable than ever. Read some historical BLS and SBA stats, SUSB at Census.gov, or pretty much any proper place that tracks historical businesses data.
There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires.
Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean millions of people are not succeeding.
Hold on, you are conflating two things. How many first gen millionaires got there through their own small business, compared to big corp RSUs?
The avg wealth of a small business owner is 3x a non business owner. Look up avg wealth by age and you do the math.
10% of Americans don’t get big corp RSUs. As I said HN lives in a weird tech echo chamber.
As I said, spend some time reading. I pointed out some good places to dig into this.
Given who was supporting the MAGA candidate, we can expect that these anti-trust cases will disappear as of January 20, 2025.
Side of the same coin. Salaryman earning millions are still salaryman. You're bounded to the whims of the employer, and can lose it all from the ups and down of the personal relationships that surround you. The American dream is not the rich employee, is moving out to that relationship and build something you own.
Building something that is bounded to the marked at large and can weather the individual change of whims is increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and more value in every corner of the market.
The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a working class increasingly repressed, at ever income bracket.
No they’re not. A “salaryman” earning millions has financial independence in 5 years maximum if they so choose.
Most people are forced to work or starve. These are not the same.
> has financial independence
well yeah the dream is not the salaryman lifestile, but the financial independence, thanks for agreeing with me
The “salaryman lifestyle” necessitates low wages. It’s a “lifestyle” because you can’t quit it. You make barely enough money to sustain your family, so that you’re forced to keep working against your will.
If you’re making millions of dollars, you’re not a salaryman. You’re making a choice to sell your labor, but you can always quit and the impact to your livelihood will be minimal.
It's not the dollar values so much as the incentive structure.
I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.
When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.
When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it.
>Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system
not great
>and then whether you listen to your manager.
I mean that's part of the job, no?
I'm sure the system isn't perfect, but I was a wee programmer back in the day when it was way more common for MBA types to be managing programmers, the idea that solid technical skills might get you promoted to the compensation of what a director might make was almost unheared of.
G's sytem of promo isn't perfect, it emphasizes the wrong things, but it's forward progress in the long run.
Your attempt to sow a divide among people by labeling them the derogatory "elites" in line with GOP talking points isn't helpful here.
If you want to ground this conversation in facts, here's a few for you to chew on:
1. Someone earning $500k/year TC still has far more in common with someone earning $80k or even $50k when you compare them against people with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who control capital.
2. Someone earning $500k in a vhcol area like the Bay Area still likely cannot afford what historically was considered a "nice" home in a "nice" neighborhood without years of saving up when those homes cost $3M+.
3. Someone earning that may not necessarily be wealthy and be largely dependent on their ability to continue receiving a paycheck compared to those with true wealth who can take loans against like billionaires.
The reality is, someone earning that much is likely financially comfortable where a major disaster likely won't bankrupt them, and can likely afford reasonable housing for a family, and retire one day. That is more than most of America for sure right now and that sucks, but it absolutely does not make them "elite" and it speaks volumes of the efficacy of the GOP propaganda machine that you and so many others think that.
That used to simply be "the American dream."
20% down on a 3 million dollar home is $600k. If they can't save that much in 5 years making $500k/yr, dare I say they're really not trying hard enough? say you only see half of that 500k after taxes (which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in). $250k/yr - saving $120k, still gives you $130k post-tax, or $10,800/month to rent, pay for groceries, utilities, fuel, retirement, entertainment, everything else.
People are living on half that, if not less. $3,000/month? $2,000? Saying that $500k doesn't go very far just because they have to have the $3,000,000+ house isn't likely to garner much sympathy.
Oh no, it's going to take a couple of years to save up for the down payment on a $3 million house. How about not making enough to be able to save for a down payment on any house in the prime parts of the Bay Area!
$500k/yr is enough to buy a lot of luxuries that are denied to those making $50k/yr, and it's stupid to try and deny it.
But that's simple jealousy. Some software person at Google writing ad software isn't the one that moved manufacturing jobs out of America, nor do they have the power to bring them back. They can't vote on a tarrifs or fund a stimulus in Congress to help American workers. They don't set public policy at all. The best they can do at stealing from the government is to cheat a bit on their taxes, or be a NIMBY after they've bought that house.
I agree with you in general, but this part is off:
> which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in
Stock that a company gives you as compensation is treated as ordinary income at the time it vests, based on the value when it vests. If your total comp is $250k salary + $1M in stock over four years, and the stock value stays flat, your taxes are the same as if you got $500k in salary each year (a bit worse, actually, because of the first year vesting all at once making your income $250k and then $750k); if it doubles the day after your grant and stays flat after that, your taxes are the same as if you got $750k in salary each year. Long-term capital gains only apply to increases in stock value after it vests - not any different than if you sold your company stock immediately and bought another stock.
Good point! You're totally right, assuming they're RSUs, which they probably are.
There are more exotic situations where they aren't, and also there are ESPPs (employee stock purchase program) which are also different though that's not a grant, but I don't want to rathole on stock option grant stuff here.
With all due respect, you're disconnected from reality.
- Earning 500k TC for 15 years equals financial independence and retiring at age 45 if you're careful (even if you lived in a HCOL)
- Earning 50k means working until you're 65 with a meanger 401k and spend the rest of your life depending on social security
Just because high earners aren't billionaires doesn't mean they can relate in any way to someone earning 50k or even 80k, that is absurd.
If they graduated from Ivy or Stanford or Berkeley, they are elite even if they are unemployed after graduating.
A big factor for early employees (not N. 1 or 2, but the first XXXX) is purely being lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stroke-of-...
This was 2007. Now worth 15 times more.
The Chef as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
paid 26M USD in 2009. Now worth 15 times more.
So half a billion USD for this.
(same for Nvidia or OpenAI employees just riding the wave)
I did "reasonably" well for a couple decades and then I did, if not spectacularly, well for a decade+ that certainly set me up for retirement. And I might have even retired earlier absent COVIVD. Not spectacular sums but certainly reasonable amounts given owning a house and modest travel sums.
You really shouldn't quit Google if your plan is to get rich. You should quit if you don't care too much about money and want more interesting work than being a cog in a lucrative machine.
Yeah. Google or any of the big techs are the lowest risk paths to economic stability and independence. Anyone with the ability to work on one should absolutely take it.
Those who have the ability to take such a path often have other paths available to them that they can take with more risk–because the low risk path is always available to them as a fallback.
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
That has always been the case. If anything, software development opened up a brand new avenue for people to get rich other than stuffy “elite” colleges that feed into NYC/Chicago/Boston into finance/law/medicine.
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
I mean getting a job as a SWE at Google is hardly a good strategy if you don't enjoy writing software. But yes once you're there is very hard to justify doing anything else, there's a reason why they call them "golden handcuffs".
> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-capitalists would be better off joining the working class instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't have the financial means to build their own company, is relegated to a sub-par quality of life.
Same as it ever was. The company man is hardly a new phenomenon.
At one point Musk was within $100,000 of personal and business bankruptcy when Tesla ran short of funds.
I would bet a substantial sum that Tesla was insolvent early in the m3. They suddenly were firing people all over the place and not paying many vendors, and paying others quite late. Additionally, the finance pros kept quitting right then....
I think it went bk, but Musk bet that he could hype up the stock enough to raise cash in the next offering and then pretend it never happened...
If you're that interested, read the Musk biography I linked to in this thread. It's a good read.
Based on which source? Musk?
The biography "Elon Musk" by Vance.
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Billionaire-SpaceX-Shaping/...
There is no guarantee of success. There is a lot of luck involved.
Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during nights and weekend and then founded his company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera
Jensen Huang said when they started Nvidia at one point they were thirty days from going out of business.
Also compare the TinyPilot (at $399) to the open source JetKVM ($69) which is supposed to come out soon.
https://jetkvm.com/
(Not saying it for this person, as I don't know), but there is a case also where you can be a very average performer, just hiding in a large corporation (or retiring, as some people even say), then you will be very well paid, and highly considered. Then once you leave to create your own projects or join a small start-up, reality hits.
Ain't this the truth. So many mediocre people hide in a giant company, learn how to hit their kpis and think they're crushing it, but get smacked in the face by reality when they leave.
My experience at a small company is that I always feel mediocre :)
I assure you that Imposter Syndrome is a daily reality even for Senior Engineers at Google.
I thought once I reached Staff at Google it would go away. It in fact made it even worse now that I have a whole slate of incredible peers to compare myself to.
The internal culture at Google outright fosters it. Everything from the interview process on.
My mental health is 5x better since leaving.
It's a lot harder to found a business successfully than most people imagine.
Incorrect. In fact YC’s (i.e. the website you’re on) whole thesis is that it’s a lot easier to found a business successfully than most people imagine. Yeah, they’ve drifted from their roots a little but I think it’s been proved out.
The irony is killing me.
It’s incredibly easy to found/start a business.
It’s incredibly hard to build that beginning into a profitable money machine.
80% of businesses fail within 5 years.
Well, less than 1% of lifeforms are born as humans but that doesn’t seem to scare people into not having babies.
Interesting, but I don't get it. Are you saying people aren't scared of having babies even though they can randomly give birth to an ant or an elephant?
How many have you founded? Important data point for such an opinion.
> It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.
You don’t really have to wonder, Google (really all big tech) stocks mooned since 2018, so he’d likely be far wealthier.
I love the part of the story in which a guy in a windbreaker knocks on his door on Sunday morning and tells him that he has to come with him since a sprinkler popped in his office.
I know really few people that can write such relatable and honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years now. Great inspiration source
I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc).
With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value.
Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.
> the most important lesson of any career: The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by "process".
In short, your real customers are not even people anymore, they are a process.
Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help people is the sweet spot in both career and society.
From the Fine Article:
"Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions."
>I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.
Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.
Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite.
So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise).
See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.
Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased responsibility with ease.
Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.
> Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.
While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay.
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...
The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.
I find it super sad that we should teach kids how to climb corporate ladders rather than taking control of their life, starting businesses, making the world a better place or chasing a career of fulfilment rather than maximizing money return.
Agreed. Every kid their senior year of high school should be forming an LLC, starting a company around their idea, learning the basic skills to operate one, if they want to graduate.
I sometimes can't even detect sarcasm on HN anymore. What 16-18 year old kid (or their parents) has the capital and time to start and run their own business? Even when they're adults, they likely will not have access to business ownership. Depending on the source you use, somewhere between 5 and 10% of Americans own their own business. I'm not saying basic business skills aren't valuable--they are, but the vast, vast majority of people will work for someone else throughout their careers. Shouldn't we be optimizing education for the 90% case?
You and I have a fundamentally different view about how to optimize education. Your view is probably great to cover the base case of people “checking out” of their children’s education, but my individualized view doesn’t care about the 90% but the child in front of me.
I’d also posit that this approach to education reduces overall attainment by dulling the edge of what the margin is capable of.
Very few of the subjects I studied in high school reach the bar of being useful to 5-10% of the students
I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but:
You could make it work if this "everyone forms an LLC in school" initiative comes with "everyone gets a chunk of cash to invest into this business". I assume the time would come from restructuring curriculums so that half of your senior year is spent on this project. Maybe add another year onto high school instead that is the Business Year.
This would also require a massive increase in the amount of money going into schools so it's pretty much a non-starter in the US.
As to "optimizing for the 90%", I feel like there's probably a lot of interesting differences in a world where every high school graduate has been in a boss' shoes. Possibly bosses would be able to get away with a lot less shady shit. This probably doesn't help the chances of setting it up either.
I would legit support a law that gives every 18 years old 50k to decide what to do in their life. And to adjust it with life.
As a society we would be making a better long term investment in the economy.
And give them good education, but most importantly examples we can.
I did not care for the performance review practices at Apple (and it is probably similar in every other big corporation).
We'll give you a 1 to 3 rating in three categories (it's been a while, something like: "Expertise", "Innovation", "Teamwork"). A "1" means you did not meet expectations, a "2" means you met expectations and a "3" means you exceeded expectations.
If we give you a "1" in anything, you should probably start to look for a job elsewhere.
We can't give you a "3" in two of the categories above however. Well, we can but then we have to go up the management chain — perhaps even to the director — because giving someone a "3" in more than one category means we have to raise your "grade". And moving up a grade is a Big Deal. We can only have so many top-tier engineers.
Oh, and regardless of what your manager thinks of you, all managers have to report to their manager for what we call a "leveling session". Here your manager needs to defend their choices when compensating their direct reports in front of all the other managers and of course their boss as well.
Something in particular we're looking to make sure of is that your manager rewards some of their direct-reports with bonuses, a raise, etc. but "punishes" others. Egalitarianism is frowned upon.
> maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion
Until the actual business you work for goes down the pan because everyone is optimizing for promotion
Aligning those incentives is not your job, but your manager's. If they want you to do that job they should pay you for that job. Don't work for free.
> the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers
This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics.
It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet.
We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get recognition for it.
Above a certain company size however I think what he’s describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person company you’ve very close to the company. In a > 10k person company there’s no way: there’s a lot of layers to the company and often can’t “touch” the customer as an employee. The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact: you can’t reduce that complexity out of it.
And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy.
But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want.
And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.
> And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy.
This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.
And it is working generally very well if you compare GCP and Azure. DX is much better at GCP but Azure does stuff that companies care much better and is 2x bigger.
MS offers bundle deals to managers who eat that up like a 1980’s TV wife bragging about how she “saved” the family $300 by buying $1000 of shit they didn’t need.
It’s been their schtick practically from the beginning.
What you are describing is contracting, self-employment, consultancy, and those are orthogonal to having a career.
Why are you adding this distinction? Having done both, I can’t say I disagree with GP. Maybe I‘ve overlooked something.
They probably prefer to believe they don’t have to do those things.
Sounds like hell.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used that financial stability to do something high risk which most people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)
> author seems like they were only there for a promotion
It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.
This is not true. Google is so large that I'm definitely willing to believe that there are parts where people are like this, but I found that people generally did not care about my level and while there are many docs/slides about how to get promoted it was largely oriented towards helping people advocate effectively for themselves and was not "thou shall be promoted".
There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
> There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful work in such an environment.
No, it really isn't.
The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.
An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.
I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.
But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.
Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.
> The amount of time is very long
It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.
What did it used to be?
When I started in 2011 I was told "up or out" of L4 by 4 years.
That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.
I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion. L4 money was good enough.
What happens once you hit L5? You just need to perform satisfactorily each year?
Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.
There's different kinds of customers for different kinds of bureaucracies though.
However, it looks like the people working at L4 for Google are being handled no differently by HR than assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies. Better pay for more people than most of the old guard, but why can't they do this part of it with some ingenuity.
>The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period
At least factory workers know this is not going to happen from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time ago.
You would think Google was built from a different foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost like they didn't know any better.
Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion of the output of people who never got promoted.
Financially, if you were going to invest in people, that would make them the better investment than those who did get promoted :\
It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it, but you could probably tell how high-performance the unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any money or not any more, and how much.
Now what about the people who could never get hired at Google or places like that to begin with?
If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the sky's the limit !
You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at corporate climbing :)
I will second what the parent poster says, people definitely cared about levels in the teams I was on (2016-2021). Sometimes people would talk about other engineers using only their level. E.g. "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" or my manager introducing new teammates by saying "we have a new L5 joining the team". This seemed normal to a lot of people at Google, but since I have worked at other places where someone's level almost never comes up in any conversation I always found it a little concerning.
So like I said, I definitely believe that it happened, but I didn't see it and I have a hard time believing it was the norm. I was there 2016-2022. Also the "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" person sounds like a bit of a dick.
How long would you say Google has been like this? Around the time when they realized they had an unstoppable monopoly? IPO? Early years? Always?
In my humble experience some time between 2006-8 and 2013. Unless they hid it that well from us interns.
It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.
This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes one can guess.
Yes, the last few years there has been a big push to try to hide levels, don't celebrate promos as publicly, etc, but the overall you can't overnight change (if ever) a culture that has been built for two decades around this concept.
> they were only there for a promotion?
My experience: initially, I learned a lot of new things, I was excited to work for a big famous company. But eventually, it started to be less fun and more stressful. There's an endless push for impact or to improve some questionable metrics, while technical debt is building up. Also there's always uncertainty about reorgs and layoffs. Lots of anxiety related to the next evaluation cycle.
After a few years, I can say money is probably my main driver. Although, I don't want to get promoted because I certainly don't want more stress. I want to stay in this company as long as possible because I will be very hard to earn more money elsewhere.
I would be very discouraged if the people who set tech strategy at my company were the ones who had passed me on the promo ladder by not writing any tests and refusing to go to interviews or help their team fix bugs.
Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20 an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't you enjoy software engineering?
My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.
Actually, that varies from person to person. I've been fine not being promoted (less time doing the self-reporting monkey-dance leaves more time to work on projects), and I make enough to satisfy my material needs and desires. And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire. There's just the work and the chance of a cash-out (or of changing the world, whatever gets you up in the morning).
Very different from the BigCo rat race.
> And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire.
This is something I'd assumed every engineer-type person faces sooner or later. Unless you're in a massive corp with hundreds of engineers, there's only maybe two or three tiers of engineering roles. That's two promotions, ever, unless you want to be promoted out of engineering and into management. So if you want to stay technical, instead of chasing higher status job titles, you have to chase higher status projects.
It's less about comparing to your ancestors, more your peers in other industries. If you're getting payed say $40/h, that's muuuuch more than most other jobs, and can give you a comfortable living for quite a while.
I agree human psychology is part of it and can help explain someone's mentality, but I don't think human psychology can fully justify someone's behaviour, since humans aren't automatons beholden to their psychology.
Not if you live in a very high cost of living area. Which is where the biggest Google offices are.
That's a good point, but I don't believe it scales at the same rate -- meaning I believe the salaries are much higher than the living costs.
Eg average us salary is probably somewhere around 60k. Let's say single bedroom apartment not in SF is maybe like 1.5k/mo, that leaves like 42k left over.
Google salary I would guess is closer to 150k (low end probably); SF single bedroom is probably closer to 4k/mo, that leaves 102k. Big difference, and note the ratio here isn't as important as the absolute value. You live a very different life with 102k than with 42k.
And also note wealth doesn't really increase linearly with how much money you have, it tends to be more than linear, because people with lots of money are more comfortable investing large chunks of it, which further increases their wealth.
Internally most larger tech companies index their salary bands based on the CoL of the employee. The downturn over the last couple years has had many companies move reqs from high CoL areas to low CoL areas to save money.
IME of Big Cos, it is never cost of living that is taken into account, but what "the competition" in the local market are paying, and then some percentile of that.
Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the company is targeting. So they claim it is open and transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential sorry")
This is how you end up with situations like London, which is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g. transport, food etc).
London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural World Capital and attracts loads of people from across the world so there is more competition for tech/high-skilled roles because so many people move to London after they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower but everything else is more expensive due to population density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in Zurich so there are less people competing for each job, so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and understandably plan to leave after a few years.
Agree and not only that, Google attracts a certain type of person that I feel like is more competitive and slightly obsessed with self image (senior role titles for example)
> Why is it a dealbreaker?
Because they can find a job that pays way more than $20 an hour. That's it.
It's a little more than that. At the level this engineer was at, they are expected to seek and attain promotion. Sitting at a level below staff becomes a negative and can lead to you being put on a PIP because you aren't meeting the declared expectations when you aren't being promoted.
Google eventually removed that language because they learned that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough room in the pyramid and they'll lose the people who are doing the keeping-the-lights-on work who don't self-promote. They didn't know that yet in 2018 if memory serves.
It was senior (L5) that you were expected to reach, not staff. It was revised down to L4. For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.
> For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.
Straight out of school, yes. With a few years of outside experience and an advanced degree, it is easy to join at L5. Which I think is ideal, no promotion headaches, just focus on interesting work (L6 already starts to be management heavy, so not that attractive).
Yes switching jobs is often a path to "sideways promotion". You have to interview well, but that's something that's learnable - and more under your control in a way, than getting good promotable projects at your current employer.
Yes, good point I should have clarified that.
> the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?
Based on Blind and personal experience, the vast majority of people in big tech are literally doing that. It’s probably the most used carrot used by management in those companies too, so hard to blame them
> the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?
Well, yes obviously? People get jobs to get money, and a promotion gives you more money.
The ones not aiming for a promotion are the strange ones, not the ones who are.
I'd say that's a rather narrow way to look at it.
I know more than a handful of folks who are very happy with their level of responsibility and comp, and don't want higher expectations and more stress even if it would bring in significantly more cash. I personally think that's a pretty healthy way to look at it. Not everything in life is about money.
Fairly sure Google has/had a cliff for engineers to reach senior by a certain time frame. That puts immense pressure to get promoted, or you get laid off.
It's no longer senior, it's only L4 (new hires are usually L3). Also I never knew the time length for the cliff, but I think it was really, really long.
It also wasn't, as far as I know, every strictly enforced. There were folks when I joined (which was when the L5 requirement still existed, but it was in its way out) who had been L4 for like a decade.
Right, while there was a "growth" expectation for L4s written into the SWE job ladder, there were no fixed timelines. Enforcement varied from org to org: at least one of my previous orgs periodically conducted talent reviews, specifically looking at cases like long-tenured L4s to decide whether to intervene.
That was before the layoffs started. One of my by then ex-reports, who was a very talented and knowledgeable but not at all career-focused long-time L4s got laid off in one of the rounds. :(
Not just Google - I haven't seen many companies which would tolerate people being stuck on junior level for many years. They'd be slowly managed out (unless the company is government or really big).
Author here. Cool to see this pop up again!
Happy to answer any questions about this post.
Forgive me if I seem presumptuous in my advice here. You've done things in your career that I can only dream of doing. What I can say is that I've somehow managed to survive a quarter-century in a string of Big Tech companies without dropping out (yet).
It sounds like you may have been looking at the currents and picking the one that seemed best one to swim in. I found there's often -- but not always -- another option: build a dam. In other words, change it up. Alter the landscape. Seek to change the business in a way that nobody's been willing/able to do before. Looking back at my career I found I was happiest and most successful when I was able to tell my boss what I was doing vs. waiting for my boss to tell me to do something interesting/impactful/etc.
When that option doesn't seem to be presenting itself, it's probably time to move on. But I've found it's often worth giving it a try first.
A couple of times I needed to earn the right to create my own destiny by pushing through some grunge work, but once I established a degree of trust with my management chain, that was capital I could "cash in on" by proposing something big, new, and interesting. It never ceases to amaze me to see how boldness often gets rewarded. I just saw a co-worker of mine draw blood from a stone (funding-wise) by proposing something ambitious and controversial last week. Suddenly they're a TL of a new team this week. They've built a reputation for "just getting it done," so management has confidence in their ability to execute and drive results.
Whenever I'm starting to feel stuck in a rut, that's when I open a blank document and start hammering out a design for something new. I'm not even thinking about promotion when I do that. But somehow, somewhere down the road, either a promotion or a bigger opportunity with another company has always come of it.
Context for others: steelframe and I were teammates at Microsoft in the late 2000s.[0]
Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!
This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't have time to think of the best projects for me.
I probably would have been better off figuring out my own high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-term fires that kept popping up for my team.
In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011696
Can you explain how this doesn’t amount to saying “You seem like you’re brave. There’s another option: be a coward.”
You don’t seem to be proposing an alternative strategy with equivalent risk/reward dynamics, rather, it seems like what amounts to anathema to entrepreneurship.
some people would rather be well paid, secure cowards than scrappy risk-taking heroes.
But GP is specifically talking to someone who isn’t in that bucket?
I saw your post about selling TinyPilot, congratulations! FWIW I agree with all your points in your 2018 article, and I wish I had left Google sooner too.
I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it :-).
Cheers!
--
1: https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
Thanks!
No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing target that has a good bug bounty program.
My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish the book I've been promising to write for the past four years.[0]
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/
Very cool, I just subscribed for updates!
Love the book title!
I've been following your story for the past several years since you wrote this post and it helped me understand the realities of indie hacking and startups more than most articles, so thanks for writing in public and documenting your journey, I'm sure I'm not the only one you helped. By the way, whenever I see your username, I always seem to read it as Mount Lynch, haha.
Haha, maybe if one of my companies does really well, I'll be able to buy a mountain and name it after me.
Thanks so much! That's really nice to hear.
I don't have anything useful to add but just want to say, like many others have said, I really appreciate the way you have continued to document your journey from start to today and not shied away from sharing details. Thank you for that!
Nice to see you on HN :-) Too bad we couldn’t reach a deal on your Keto site, but hopefully the new owner takes care of it well. Can’t wait to see what you will do next! Cheers!
Happy to have met you in Berlin at the merge :)
Hi Mish! Great meeting you as well and cool to run into you again here!
How old were you when you decided to quit Google? How much savings did you have at that point?
I was 32 and single, so I had a lot of freedom to take the risk at that point.
I don't want to say my exact net worth at the time, but I earmarked $400k to last me five years of trying to make it on my own.
$400k was kind of extreme because I assumed I'd maintain the lifestyle I had at Google, including my $4.2k/mo apartment in downtown Manhattan. I ended up moving to Western Massachusetts, where my burn rate was significantly lower and could have been even lower if I rented an apartment instead of buying a house.
The conclusion I took away from this piece is just how heartless it is to depend on a promotion committee. I know Google put them in place because they wanted an Engineering-driven culture where people could do great Engineering work and still be recognized, even if their manager didn't. But it sure doesn't sound like these promotion committees are recognizing great Engineering work, especially when that work falls under difficult-to-quantify cultural improvements.
Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders, etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional working relationships with colleagues.
Exactly. There are non-monetary rewards to doing good work: esprit de corps from a team of coworkers you like and respect, satisfaction and pride in your craft, positive responses from users, and so on.
For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only to find that the prize is: more pies. It’s fine to recognize that your interests and your employer’s are only loosely aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you to.
Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.”
I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
Author here!
>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them ended up building life style business because the markets of their ideas were actually much smaller.
If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.
Yeah, I agree financial ROI is definitely higher in a FAANG, especially the last five years.
I'm still glad that I left when I did, as I value autonomy a lot, so being able to choose what to do every day is worth a lot to me.
> the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control
Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
Screw promotion. I just want a job that provides intrinsic motivation (meaningful, inspiring work; Flow), and pays enough for me to make ends meet and to save reasonably.
There are three problems:
- many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted);
- meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right;
- most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation.
Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.
Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google".
And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.
What sounded like the usual Google-internal-self-congratulatory-echo-chamber nonsense grated on me, too, but I kept reading, and was glad I did, because the article didn't go like the usual.
They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.
What companies would you say have world-class engineering now (2024)?
2017-2022 I would've said the Ethereum foundation and various DeFi startups. If you look at what Ethereum accomplished with proof of stake, it's quite remarkable. The game theory alone for proof of stake is thorny as hell, and then they built a working secure implementation and upgraded a distributed network of unaffiliated organizations who all voluntarily run nodes, all without major hitches or anyone's funds being lost. That's huge, and more impressive than anything Google's done in the last 5 years.
Since 2022, I would probably say the various LLM owners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, etc. The complexity here isn't in the basic transformer architecture though (which was invented by Google in 2017), but in the data infrastructure that hoovered up all the data on the web to train it on, as well as the fine-tuning on various use-cases.
Not surprisingly, good engineers follow the money: these have also been the lucrative industries in those time periods.
It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get carelessly tossed from one project to another without any consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world, and eating the free-est food in the world" (and probably being paid quite handsomely as well) is not enough for happiness, unless there is also promotion involved.
We definitely do things wrong in this world.
This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks that my project desperately needs me to get done.
I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.
Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google comp?
Lots of places, for two reasons
1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere).
2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.
Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at regular companies.
I know at my last job I closed any resumes that had Google on them. They generally didn’t do well at startups in my opinion, the scope and responsibilities are too broad and there is no where to hide. And the ones I did hire tended to want to make everything look the way it did at Google.
That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge number of software employees, that it seems unwise to draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine has been a much smaller sample size than the total that you've personally worked with.
exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something that is completely not applicable here.
I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.
Google would be a $50-100k bump over Google if they promoted me to the level commensurate with my experience
Google doesn't exactly pay top of market.
who does these days?
Lots of high-paying companies, if you work on hard engineering problems. Probably not many for CRUD or frontend.
Let's hear some examples :)
HFT (evergreen), kernel hacker, machine learning engineer, AI compiler engineer, GPU engineer are the top of the crop currently.
Smaller companies need to outbid Google for talent, especially if they carry less stability. I imagine there are quite many who went like: leaves Google for great cash package at smaller company/start up -> smaller company goes belly up -> go back to FAANG
Google comp is known to be low. Top candidates with in-demand skills can easily ask for 2x TC of google and get a stream of offers pouring in.
ask where?
If you indicate that you're available, and you have a attractive public profile, top headhunters will contact you.
I did this. Google (at least, the chain of managers I had) didn't know how to manage people like me and I wish I'd realized it sooner.
I make more money now doing more effective work faster at a smaller company with a focused project, not a 100,000-person everything company.
would you be willing to share how much more you made and what you had been making?
It used to be that you would put together your promo packet, which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that decides whether or not you get promoted.
Technically yes, but "promo committee" has also changed to be your immediate org instead of being independent. Which makes your promo more dependent on your manager's influence.
No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference between before and now is that before, your manager was expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager is expected not to be an advocate, but to provide their balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).
The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.
The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.
The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.
Will Google turn into a university next?
Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.
Google works like academia because that’s all the founders knew.
I mean, it's always seemed pretty academic to me, due to the founders.
At all levels?
I know it changes every year so I don't let my own personal experience color my perception of Google 2024, but some years when I was there my manager barely even knew where my desk was. My promo packets for L5 and L6 were judged by peer committees and I am not sure they even saw my manager evaluations. When I sat on an L5 promo committee we did not weigh manager assessments. This made sense at that time because of how hands-off managers were in the realm of the reasons a person could get promoted to L5.
These days it's the manager who writes the next-level assessment (NLA) and it's the NLA that forms the main body of the packet that the promo committee looks at. They're also the one soliciting and summarizing peer feedback etc.
That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade. I hope the current managers are up to the job! Most of my managers didn't have even the slightest inkling of how to evaluate what I was doing on the job. One of them was mainly occupied with running the "mindfulness" office.
> That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade
Yes, there have been some very signficant changes over the last few years. Promos are decided in-org. Managers play a much more important role. There are promo quotas along with associated pressures (felt more acutely in some orgs compared to others).
But, putting that asides, a manager who doesn't have any idea of what or how their reports are doing is clearly failing at their job under any of those systems.
Most large tech companies require the manager to write some sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee. But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent. This is quite rare and a neat feature.
In theory, yes. In practice, it would take some pretty extraordinary circumstances for one to get promoted without their manager's support.
For starters, even if it is the candidate themselves who self-nominate, it is still the manager who writes the promo readiness assessment that forms the main body of the packet. It is also the manager's job to solicit peer feedback and represent it to the committee.
One could imagine a scenario where the manager's opinion diverges sharply from the assessment of the session lead and other senior folks sitting on the committee (who decide collectively) but again, those would be some pretty exceptional circumstances...
Layered on top of this are promo quotas, which already mean that some folks who do tick all the boxes aren't getting promoted as soon as they would be otherwise (or at all). That is to say that there are lots of headwinds even if the manager is supportive, let alone when they aren't.
Funny enough, optimizing for promotion is not only a common strategy among individual contributors but is also encourage by mgmt. During my single year at Google I collaborated with a guy from a different team. His strategy was to do most of the meaningful (measureable) work on his own. Fair enough, I don't care. But he didn't predict that the project can be reassign. At that was exactly what happened. When I ask product manager why, he said that this is normal practice, credits should go to the product owning team. When discussed such situations with other googlers two separate views emerge: either you're new and you exploit the system as is or "It's not the same google any more". Funny fact that we still think about that old google when it comes to culture, work, ppl, etc.
> Metrics or it didn’t happen
Sadly the chosen metric can be subject to politics. You’ll find stakeholders have their pet metric, claim another stakeholders metric doesn’t measure what’s important, or a new, important person thinks all the metrics are garbage and need to be changed.
I’ve had successful projects hit their metrics and those have also gotten caught up in politics.
The author also has an update for 6 years later: https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/
I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this:
> The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data.
I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion?
I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone.
> My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice.
Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy.
The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work".
Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.
Hi, I'm "the guy." Thanks for reading!
I largely agree with you.
I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion.
My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.
I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale.
I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.
> My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.
oh wow. Reading this made me realize why (in the context of a big tech career) it's such a good idea to have a mentor whose reasonably far away from your team. They could have probably pointed this out to you early.
Yeah, I found a mentor at the beginning of year 4, and they were very helpful. There were a lot of things happening on my team that I didn't understand, and my mentor was able to recognize them as political patterns that were somewhat common.
I realize I maybe came across as naive thinking that I could get promoted without thinking much about career strategy or politics, but that's how the first few years of my career had worked out.
After undergrad, I worked for Microsoft for three years, and I got promoted twice without ever thinking about career. I just did the projects my team needed, and did a good job. Same thing when I worked for NCC group: promoted after a year and was on track for more.
One of the big differences in other companies was that they gave me opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in my day to day work rather than needing to see me launch something big and shiny. I invested a lot into peer reviews and building repeatable processes, so managers at those companies were able to see that impact my team even if it would be hard to prove measurable results to an external promo committee.
That TinyPilot is really cool. It deserves to take off. I'm surprised he's still bootstrapping at this point, because with a product like that, there's a lot more to gain than there is to lose by taking angel and VC money.
Thanks, Justine! I'm a big fan of your work.
I actually sold the company earlier this year.[0] I never looked into VC money primarily because I like the independence of being the sole owner, though I agree there would have been a lot of advantages.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
“I quit myself to work for Google” is the most common pattern but not as much spoken about. We can see the side effects of it in posts like these and countless others that come with forced contraptions as ways to justify having quit Google.
When I worked as a post doc, I wasn’t paid much but I got a direct return on extra work: another paper etc. when I got my first job as a data scientist, I was paid much more but there was seemingly little response to extra work. It was distressing. But later I learned that making a good impression on people would pay off long term, through recommendations for new jobs etc.
If you are that good that Google wants to hire you, it means you don't need Google, you can do fine on your own or working somewhere else.
I know this article is about Google's culture and the author is a strong developer, but it reminds me of conversations with junior developers at other companies. I've worked with a lot of junior folks that think they should be a "senior" 2 years out of their undergrad CS courses. After all, fixing some tests independently fullfills the "leads complex projects" box on the leveling chart.
That’s the guy who created TinyPilot. Since then he wrote yearly articles about it’s IndieHacker journey. Some of them have been shared on HN. Worth reading!
It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the visibility of the organisation. The author also sounds like he went 'off books' a bit helping out on things they were interested in, rather than what was on jira boards or whatever their sponsor cared about. You'll get punished for this in a lot of places, it's just how it is. Management need to see what you are doing.
Let me try a short reply: if the manager needs to see what somebody is doing, he hast to look at it. Not look KPIs and metrics. KPI and easy metrics are for lazy bad managers.
I already mentioned above, direct managers don't have organisational visibility and can't decide among the hundreds who should be promoted and who shouldn't. The promotion request needs to go some central forum with objective criteria. This is not to say your manager can't represent you vigorously to this forum.
+1. unless you own sizeable equity. you are not (your employer's) company.
Loyalty to a company doesn't always translate to a long-term payoff
Working with the promise of a future promotion is, effectively, giving credit to your employer.
"In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist."
- Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.
Congratulations, OP learned about "we expect loyalty and effort from you, but you won't get any from us", which is 99.5% of all companies out there. I hope OP does well on their own and don't have to work in this kind of disingenuous places in the future.
this is inspiring as people like me are also going this process, don't know what would happen next but also no regret
its kind of cool to see this guy getting his own product up. you go friend!
By now the author missed on approx. 2 million dollars of income.
There are more important things in life than money.
Said on a VC forum?
Yes, one would think if this community actually valued VC activities they would be praising the author for forging his own way and starting companies rather than tearing him down for choosing not to take the easy way and suckling on googles teets.
Huh? What does that have to do with my comment?