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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 :-).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[+] [-] shoo|1 year ago|reply
https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/
https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
[+] [-] Etheryte|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] yard2010|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] phyzix5761|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] heresie-dabord|1 year ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] DeathArrow|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hinkley|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ljm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LightBug1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cdrini|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mtlynch|1 year ago|reply
Happy to answer any questions about this post.
[+] [-] steelframe|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] emmanueloga_|1 year ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] satvikpendem|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sjs7007|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AureliusMA|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ushakov|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dom96|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] solatic|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adonovan|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grisBeik|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] misstercool|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] mtlynch|1 year ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] joshdavham|1 year ago|reply
Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
[+] [-] goalonetwo|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neilv|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfman123|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwaway_5753|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidfiala|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alarge|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeffbee|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gopher2000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1024core|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] softwaredoug|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] azangru|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] coding123|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joshdavham|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] belval|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] maslo0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jart|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hugodan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] robertclaus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DeathArrow|1 year ago|reply