Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
For the past four years, I've worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.
You apply for promotion by assembling a “promo packet”: a collection of written recommendations from your teammates, design documents you’ve created, and mini-essays you write to explain why your work merits a promotion.
A promotion committee then reviews your packet with a handful of others, and they spend the day deciding who gets promoted and who doesn’t.
(Wasn't there a topic for random articles, kinda like WTF bites? I can't seem to find it. Good things threads are free.)
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@blek said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
Wasn't there a topic for random articles, kinda like WTF bites?
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/16122/quick-links-thread/
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@blek Wow, not that I've ever had any ambition to work for Google but this gives an even more dystopian view of the company than even the Damore fiasco!
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If I manage to vastly increase my spare time, I'm going to start speaking at college career centers to warn the next generation about applying to these kinds of companies. It's getting tiresome reading stories about Uber treating employees like shit, or Google treating their people in a manner like in the OP, and the authors of these sob stories blissfully unaware of what they were walking into.
No, kids, find yourself a job at Small But Stable Accounting/ERP System Company #11346, where you are able to personally know at least one or two people in the C-suite, if you aren't already directly reporting to them. You won't make as much money or have the name recognition, but you will skip metric tons of drama and politics.
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@blek
Wow, pretty nice Sick System that Google has going there. Apparently those don't count as Evil any more...
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Never apply for promotion. Only apply for raises. If the pay is too low and you exhausted your raise opportunities, move on. If you can afford to be unnoticed, stay unnoticed. Make sure you do enough job to not be sacked when your project is inevitably cancelled, build good relationships with people you’re seeing face to face, and fuck all committees.
Remember that when some strategy asshole develops a new strategy, you’re just a resource that they will downsize without second thought. Don’t be loyal, just be professional. Earn your hard buck, fuck all the corporate one big family talk.
Don’t even think of considering the HR department as the same species as you. Their allegiance is with the company and the company only. Fuck them.
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@izzion they stopped all the „no evil” shit a few years back. Now they are doing serious business, ya know. Next you hear of them hiring hitmen and killing journalists they dislike.
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@wft said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
Don’t even think of considering the HR department as the same species as you.
As a man married to a woman who is an HR director for a fairly large corporation, I can attest that this is sound advice.
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@wft said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
Next you hear of them hiring hitmen and killing journalists they dislike.
No you won't. It will be buried in all search results.
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TLDR: promotions at Google go through an anonymous committee of people who don't know shit about the subject (here: the promotion candidate). Things end up exactly like everything else in the world that has to go through an anonymous committee of people who don't know shit about the subject - jackasses gaming the system and ending up on top, and everyone else losing will to live.
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@polygeekery said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
As a man married to a woman who is married to
LOL CUCK
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@blek I really should proofread my own stuff.
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@blek I thought that was a roundabout way of referring to himself. But then again I'm used to c++ and tracing pointer shenanigans.
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(from the article):
I was 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.
I am absolutely certain that's not true since I've first heard of their absurd ass-backwards C++ coding guidelines.
There are probably some good people in the “Google X”-or-what-they-call-their-research-department, but the grunts are just the same level as everywhere. I still expect there to be more good people in Microsoft Research than the Google one. And both are really separate companies inside companies that work completely differently.
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@kian said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@blek I thought that was a roundabout way of referring to himself. But then again I'm used to c++ and tracing pointer shenanigans.
It was. But @blek is the kind of person who, when faced with even the most tiny ambiguity, chooses the funniest interpretation regardless of probability.
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@polygeekery What pronouns does your wife prefer? I'm just trying to figure out where your kids are on that spectrum.
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OTOH the guy must have collected two years worth of living in savings to attempt such feat. I can’t imagine quitting my job, having a new family and shit, because aaarrrgh they won’t promote me. Moonlighting is more like it, although I’m a complete zombie after my day job is done.
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@groaner said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
No, kids, find yourself a job at Small But Stable Accounting/ERP System Company #11346, where you are able to personally know at least one or two people in the C-suite, if you aren't already directly reporting to them. You won't make as much money or have the name recognition, but you will skip metric tons of drama and politics.
You might not make as much money but you have the option to live in a place that doesn't have astronomical costs of living.
However, there's no guarantee on the drama and politics. It's just that it's all more personal in a small firm.
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@boomzilla Correct. I have known a boss who used to throw a tantrum when the first few people would pick up and leave his company, blaming them that they wished the ruin of the company and all that.
The bossman would even go as far as trying to badmouth them whenever he heard of them working for some other party in his usual network, though I don't know if he actually ever managed to get someone fired that way.
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You know, when I read this thread this morning, it reminds me what happens at one of my ex-company.
So, a new CTO aboard and he want to sell "outsourcing" as his new establishment for the company. He already have a team of outsource staffs ready when he joins the company. From time to time, when he see a project nearly finish, he told the team originally working on the project to stop and work on another project, and assign that near-finish project to his outsourcers. And when he sees a project that outsourcer is doing is about to crash in fire, he reassign the project to one or more permanent staffs - preferably those with bad relationship with him or those highly-paid ones - so when the project fails, he can use this as excuse to fire them.
I didn't stay too long there, so don't know what happens in the end.
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@cheong said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
I didn't stay too long there, so don't know what happens in the end.
That depends on company size and/or successful vendor lock-in in place.
Small company will just crash and disappear. Big one, or with client held hostage, will live on, bleeding money and producing horrible software.
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Why is the promotion so important to him if striving for it makes him hate his work?
Worst of all, I wasn’t proud of my work. Instead of asking myself, “How can I solve this challenging problem?” I was asking, “How can I make this problem look challenging for promotion?” I hated that.
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@adynathos Well, I don't know about that guy, but not getting promoted despite doing good work (and your manager agreeing) makes you hate work as well. Especially when you watch other people get promotions even though they don't do shit but constantly blog about how they enable customer success and spend endless hours in pointless meetings about "initiatives" ...
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@boomzilla said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
You might not make as much money but you have the option to live in a place that doesn't have astronomical costs of living.
Yep.
However, there's no guarantee on the drama and politics. It's just that it's all more personal in a small firm.
Oh, I've been at bad small companies, and I'm sure there are good large companies as much as there are good small companies. I've just noticed a trend in the past few years that people seem to have been complaining a lot about working at Google/Amazon/Facebook/Uber, and perhaps the younguns need a warning. 22-year-old me would have probably loved the prospect of working for one of those big names. 22-year-old me also didn't have a decade of experience in observing corporate psychology and the red flags that inevitably come up.
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@jbert said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@boomzilla Correct. I have known a boss who used to throw a tantrum when the first few people would pick up and leave his company, blaming them that they wished the ruin of the company and all that.
I've gotten that speech before. Remember it clearly though it was nearly seven years ago. "You're trying to destroy my company. But you won't."
The bossman would even go as far as trying to badmouth them whenever he heard of them working for some other party in his usual network, though I don't know if he actually ever managed to get someone fired that way.
"Have fun explaining a 3-year gap in your resumé."
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@bulb said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
I am absolutely certain that's not true since I've first heard of their absurd ass-backwards C++ coding guidelines
Yeah. This. As @Groaner said, 22 year old me would have been excited to work at Google. Current me would be very wary about that prospect.
I still expect there to be more good people in Microsoft Research than the Google one.
I think so too. Microsoft Research has been around for much longer. Their projects may not be as hyped and maybe not quite as alluring, but they have a much more proven track record of producing and investigating interesting stuff IMO.
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@adynathos said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
Why is the promotion so important to him if striving for it makes him hate his work?
Money.
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@groaner said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
22-year-old me would have probably loved the prospect of working for one of those big names. 22-year-old me also didn't have a decade of experience in observing corporate psychology and the red flags that inevitably come up.
22-year-old you probably didn't have much to put on resume so working at a company that everyone knows was extremely valuable on its own.
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@groaner said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@jbert said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@boomzilla Correct. I have known a boss who used to throw a tantrum when the first few people would pick up and leave his company, blaming them that they wished the ruin of the company and all that.
I've gotten that speech before. Remember it clearly though it was nearly seven years ago. "You're trying to destroy my company. But you won't."
Was the company destroyed in the end?
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@gąska said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@groaner said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@jbert said in Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself:
@boomzilla Correct. I have known a boss who used to throw a tantrum when the first few people would pick up and leave his company, blaming them that they wished the ruin of the company and all that.
I've gotten that speech before. Remember it clearly though it was nearly seven years ago. "You're trying to destroy my company. But you won't."
Was the company destroyed in the end?
Google tells me the company still exists. When I worked there, it was about 12 people. I gave my notice, and three other people left the company within about three months.
Three years later, there was enough interest to have a reunion dinner of ex-employees, and there were two tables of about ten people. One table was full of people I had worked with, and the other was people who had joined the company and left it in the intervening three-year period. That's right, the company had around 200% turnover in three years. Decades of combined experience and domain knowledge down the drain, the company lives on. And it's probably still paying its developers half of what I'm making now.
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@adynathos You aren't a person that worked under the fucking sword of damocles that is time sheets and other arbitrary measures that don't directly show how you show value to the business.
I have a very nice manager who is "Mr Breakdown" and I am a "Mr. I will have a go at the problem" .
I have been "late" on everything because another developer has estimated my tasks that know the system.
