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.
(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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/
https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.
We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.
It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.
I know really few people that can write such relatable and honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years now. Great inspiration source
Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc).
With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value.
Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.
Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by "process".
In short, your real customers are not even people anymore, they are a process.
Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help people is the sweet spot in both career and society.
From the Fine Article:
"Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions."
Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.
Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite.
So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise).
See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.
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.
Until the actual business you work for goes down the pan because everyone is optimizing for promotion
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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.
But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want.
And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.
This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.
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It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.
There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
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.
My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.
Very different from the BigCo rat race.
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.
Because they can find a job that pays way more than $20 an hour. That's it.
Google eventually removed that language because they learned that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough room in the pyramid and they'll lose the people who are doing the keeping-the-lights-on work who don't self-promote. They didn't know that yet in 2018 if memory serves.
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
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Well, yes obviously? People get jobs to get money, and a promotion gives you more money.
The ones not aiming for a promotion are the strange ones, not the ones who are.
I know more than a handful of folks who are very happy with their level of responsibility and comp, and don't want higher expectations and more stress even if it would bring in significantly more cash. I personally think that's a pretty healthy way to look at it. Not everything in life is about money.
Happy to answer any questions about this post.
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.
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
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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 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!
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1: https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
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/
Thanks so much! That's really nice to hear.
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I don't want to say my exact net worth at the time, but I earmarked $400k to last me five years of trying to make it on my own.
$400k was kind of extreme because I assumed I'd maintain the lifestyle I had at Google, including my $4.2k/mo apartment in downtown Manhattan. I ended up moving to Western Massachusetts, where my burn rate was significantly lower and could have been even lower if I rented an apartment instead of buying a house.
Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders, etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional working relationships with colleagues.
For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only to find that the prize is: more pies. It’s fine to recognize that your interests and your employer’s are only loosely aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you to.
There are three problems:
- many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted);
- meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right;
- most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation.
Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.
I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.
Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
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.