This month I want to highlight an article by Michael Lynch, Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself. This article talks about the Google promotion process and how this author discovered the value in optimizing the work he did for promotion rather than for the betterment of his team. Stories like this serve as a reminder that leadership needs to appropriately respect the work required to improve existing technology. It’s easy to focus on the new tech, but equally as important to appreciate the rigor required to improve an existing product.

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google

“In my head, the promotion committee was this omniscient and fair entity. If I spent each day choosing the right problems to solve, making the codebase better, and helping my team execute efficiently, the promotion committee would magically know this and reward me for it. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work like that. It took me two years to figure that out.”