| I went from being a waiter, to a bootstrapped startup CEO with 20 employees after 4 years, who couldn't grok why employees didn't want to get involved more. Then went to Google: I was absolutely stunned, stunned, at just how reactive people are. When you're offering unsolicited advice, you have 0 idea how it's going to be taken. Even the gentlest, most caveated things can set someone off. In 7 years, I saw exactly one post-mortem, and it was well-understood doing one was seen as aggressive. One time someone was being a bully in code review, something like 7 rounds of review for 200 lines. 600 review comments from the reviewer total. I'm not kidding. Can't remember exact line count but it was 3:1. The person being reviewed, at that point, wrote a comment on the meta-situation, something relatively innocuous, can't remember it for the life of me. Within 2 quarters he was PIP'd, and it took 3 years to get a release so he could transfer to another org. This factor is probably at a high at Google, as reality can't really intrude as much as a normal company. But I did greatly change my perspective on how to communicate in the workplace when you're working for someone else. |