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>Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else. If I was at a company that promoted people on anything else but their mer

by Jerry2 9y ago

>Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else. If I was at a company that promoted people on anything else but their merit and skills, I'd leave immediately because of misalignment of values. If hard work and skills are not valued, the company itself is doomed.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
megous 9y ago
Technical ability != value to customers. Therefore a company is not doomed.
throwaway187234 9y ago
Superficially what you say might be right but the truth is far more insidious than that. For one your prospects are tied to how well your project does. Sounds reasonable right? But what this results in is many teams battling to "win" with politics often playing a large role in who is the victor, rewrites of existing code essentially to prove your technical prowess and make your promotion case and little to no valuation of team value rather than individual value, namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts. The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong. The best team isn't one simply that's the sum of the people who individually had the highest "merit". Put another way the cynical view is your shit never breaks no one notices but if it breaks in a big way and you fix it, well that's impact. Likewise adding a feature isn't nearly as much impact as rewriting the whole thing from scratch.
- mooseburger 9y ago
  > namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts. The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong. I'm not sure what this has to do with Damore. Can you clarify?
- cromwellian 9y ago
  A better way to put this is, in general, refactoring code to make it healthier, or improving product excellence by fixing some long running bugs, does not get the same visibility as launching something. However, to be fair, I haven't been at many companies where "cleaned up code base with large scale refactor and improved documentation" gets you noticed. It's just not as sexy as a customer facing launch.
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
I'd rather work for a company that promoted people on their merit, skills, and ability to help their teammates improve their skills too.
- away2017throw 9y ago
  So not only you have to compete with non-meritocratic hires to come on board, you are expected to tutor them afterwards and save their egos while code reviewing?
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    https://jocelyngoldfein.com/techs-meritocracy-problem-a6e5e0a56157 https://jocelyngoldfein.com/techs-meritocracy-problem-a6e5e0...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
BeetleB 9y ago
As someone who has worked in a place with a similar attitude, I think I understand what he meant. The stuff I saw: 1. People will not do easy yet impactful tasks. Everyone will try to solve a challenging problem, even if its effect on the bottom line is negligible. Folks who solve simple problems that bring in a lot of money are less likely to be promoted. At times, an easier solution was actively campaigned against by someone whose brilliant pet project would be impacted. 2. Highly valuing individual technical ability often ends up with devaluing team cohesion. In the place I worked, the people were very capable and smart. But the teams were not that effective. If something went wrong, people were less likely to see how existing policies and the organizational structure led to these problems, and instead focused more on which individuals were to blame. Everything - success or failure - was at the individual level. So I do not think he meant that a company should not value individual technical ability. But if they value it more than effective team management, etc - I would not work there. Been there, done that.
- xamuel 9y ago
  This just means management sucked at recognizing real talent. Real talent includes knowing how to pick low-hanging fruit, knowing how to make the challenging problem look simple, knowing how to work with a team.
anonacct37 9y ago
When people say technical ability they are often drawing a distinction between overall ability to engineer (which includes many technical and non-technical things) and ability in some super specific area (C++ template metaprogramming wizard). It's a forest for the trees sort of thing. In my limited experience with former googlers and microsoft people, they came from environments that were so far removed from real customers and product feedback that their only measure of success was if they could impress their peers by using the very latest features of C++ move semantics, as opposed to architecting/building a scalable system that actually solved a customer problem. Literally I know of a startup that basically failed because the ex-microsoft guy spent most of this time building C++ $WHATEVER to get better performance on our i/o bound app and the ex-googler spent most of his time reorganizing the repo. They never got around to delivering software that they could iterate on. [edit] Both of those places are big companies, if you feel the need to respond with how you work at company X and your team is great at getting things done, you really don't need to bother. We get it, companies with tends of thousands of employees probably have many different subcultures.

by Jerry2 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

megous 9y ago

Technical ability != value to customers. Therefore a company is not doomed.

throwaway187234 9y ago

Superficially what you say might be right but the truth is far more insidious than that. For one your prospects are tied to how well your project does. Sounds reasonable right? But what this results in is many teams battling to "win" with politics often playing a large role in who is the victor, rewrites of existing code essentially to prove your technical prowess and make your promotion case and little to no valuation of team value rather than individual value, namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts. The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong. The best team isn't one simply that's the sum of the people who individually had the highest "merit". Put another way the cynical view is your shit never breaks no one notices but if it breaks in a big way and you fix it, well that's impact. Likewise adding a feature isn't nearly as much impact as rewriting the whole thing from scratch.

mooseburger 9y ago
> namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts. The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong. I'm not sure what this has to do with Damore. Can you clarify?
cromwellian 9y ago
A better way to put this is, in general, refactoring code to make it healthier, or improving product excellence by fixing some long running bugs, does not get the same visibility as launching something. However, to be fair, I haven't been at many companies where "cleaned up code base with large scale refactor and improved documentation" gets you noticed. It's just not as sexy as a customer facing launch.

aaronbrethorst 9y ago

I'd rather work for a company that promoted people on their merit, skills, and ability to help their teammates improve their skills too.

away2017throw 9y ago
So not only you have to compete with non-meritocratic hires to come on board, you are expected to tutor them afterwards and save their egos while code reviewing?
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  https://jocelyngoldfein.com/techs-meritocracy-problem-a6e5e0a56157 https://jocelyngoldfein.com/techs-meritocracy-problem-a6e5e0...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

BeetleB 9y ago

As someone who has worked in a place with a similar attitude, I think I understand what he meant. The stuff I saw: 1. People will not do easy yet impactful tasks. Everyone will try to solve a challenging problem, even if its effect on the bottom line is negligible. Folks who solve simple problems that bring in a lot of money are less likely to be promoted. At times, an easier solution was actively campaigned against by someone whose brilliant pet project would be impacted. 2. Highly valuing individual technical ability often ends up with devaluing team cohesion. In the place I worked, the people were very capable and smart. But the teams were not that effective. If something went wrong, people were less likely to see how existing policies and the organizational structure led to these problems, and instead focused more on which individuals were to blame. Everything - success or failure - was at the individual level. So I do not think he meant that a company should not value individual technical ability. But if they value it more than effective team management, etc - I would not work there. Been there, done that.

xamuel 9y ago
This just means management sucked at recognizing real talent. Real talent includes knowing how to pick low-hanging fruit, knowing how to make the challenging problem look simple, knowing how to work with a team.

anonacct37 9y ago

When people say technical ability they are often drawing a distinction between overall ability to engineer (which includes many technical and non-technical things) and ability in some super specific area (C++ template metaprogramming wizard). It's a forest for the trees sort of thing. In my limited experience with former googlers and microsoft people, they came from environments that were so far removed from real customers and product feedback that their only measure of success was if they could impress their peers by using the very latest features of C++ move semantics, as opposed to architecting/building a scalable system that actually solved a customer problem. Literally I know of a startup that basically failed because the ex-microsoft guy spent most of this time building C++ $WHATEVER to get better performance on our i/o bound app and the ex-googler spent most of his time reorganizing the repo. They never got around to delivering software that they could iterate on. [edit] Both of those places are big companies, if you feel the need to respond with how you work at company X and your team is great at getting things done, you really don't need to bother. We get it, companies with tends of thousands of employees probably have many different subcultures.