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tiate for more resources for your team given the company's
resource allocation process, etc. Some amount of this is necessary
to do well, and some of the negotation and persuasion
skills will help in the future, but to the extent that much of
this learning deals with the particular bureacracy or process
that you need to deal with, it's significantly less valuable than
other types of learning.
When you first join a company, the learning curve usually
starts really steep (hopefully, if you've made a good choice).
You're immersed in new technologies, in a new product, and
on a new team, and there are opportunities to learn along
multiple dimensions. When I first joined Google right out of
college, I learned a lot in my first six months there. Google's
done a great job with their GoogleeDU training materials.
I soaked in all the codelabs that discussed why core abstractions
existed and how they worked. I studied programming
style guides to learn best industry practices. I read design docs
about search indexing and other scalable engineering systems
being built internally. I learned to build and ship something
seen by tens to hundreds of millions of people per day on
google.com.
Your learning rate might decrease due to organizational
issues (maybe processes have become too bureaucratic and
limit your ability to iterate and launch quickly) or due to maintenance
issues where the team doesn't grow quickly enough to
scale with the complexity of the product. The second makes it
hard for you to switch projects and work on new things.
Warning flags for me at Google started to appear when
I realized that many projects either had no concrete launch
paths or depended on non-transparent approval processes
over which I had little visibility or control. Being able to
launch products was important to the extent that I wanted to
learn how to build great products, and quick, iterative feedback
is a necessary foundation for learning. When I projected
what I could accomplish and reasonably launch by staying an
additional year, I didn't feel satisfied, so I left. There was certainly
more I could have learned by staying — I could have
dug into the internals of more major systems — but my rate
of learning no longer mirrored what I encountered when I
first started.
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