Re:I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
by mtlynch on Saturday November 09, 2024 @09:44AM
(#42094671)
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.
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