Love team, hate project
Hey y'all, Transferred in Q1 2019 to a new team, as my old team was defragged. I went for promo L3->4 last cycle and got it, mostly because my new manager went above and beyond learning about my last work and supported me through the process. My immediate teammates are all very smart, the surrounding teams are too, and I enjoy working with all of these people. But, I'm really not enjoying the work I'm doing. I came from a new and not well established team where we got to invent and design everything ourselves, and I moved into one of the oldest orgs that has constant issues with tech debt. I don't feel like I'm learning or growing as an engineer. Most of the day to day complexity comes from legacy or people issues, but I don't have the resources to replace the things causing the main issues. As of right now, I plan on talking to my manager about the situation and seeing if there are any sister teams that do things more along the lines that I'm looking for, and at worst finding another transfer in the beginning of next year. What would you do in this situation? Is there anything I could be doing in the meantime to improve this? TC: 300k
Fix the tech debt
Looking back, do you have any tips for avoiding teams like that? With regards to improving your situation - can you find something new to do that somehow fits in the group’s purview? Or maybe upgrade some of your old stack to something you’re interested in learning?
I assume at Google improving old stack and fixing tech debt do NOT lead to promotion.
If it’s just a rewrite, it’s harder, if it substantially improves metrics in terms of performance, etc - it does make things easier
Marry your team, kill the project
YoE?
Prima Donna employee
You basically have two choices at Google: manage people issues and tech debt, or deal with the fact that your new thing probably won’t gain any traction. If you don’t like either option, you should look for opportunities outside Google.
There's a third option - keep changing teams every 2-3 years and moving to newly established teams in areas that are bound to launch. Just need good perf scores.
Not so much these days.