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Completely anecdotal but I was talking to a Googler who had basically the opposite experience and recommended working at Google because of the promotion panel.

Completely anecdotal but I was talking to a Googler who had basically the opposite experience and recommended working at Google because of the promotion panel. The fact that their manager had no say in the process and that they could put together their promotion packet on their own was a feature in their mind, because their experience included their manager "forgetting" to put them up for promotion repeatedly at other companies. That being said, promotion processes do seem to be pretty screwed up in general (personal experience with 3 different companies), and fail in various ways. So it's worth keeping in mind that the "external promotion process" (getting another job) is always available. edit: grammar.

phamilton 9y ago
I worked at Yahoo during a time of pseudo stack ranking (QPR). Managers had a target for average rating, and most managers would identify a few people for promotion and give everyone else "Meets Expectations" reviews so they could give the promotion candidates "Exceeds Expectations". Even worse, managers generally used the success of their reports as part of their success criteria, so they we're always actively trying to promote people because if they didn't then they weren't successful at their jobs. So managers would help that one or two people get promoted, even if they we're generally useless. And the other devs on the team would get ignored. It was a unique time in my career, when I had a performance review rating of "Exceeds Expectations" in a review that described my contributions as "mediocre". To be fair, my manager was actually pretty good and acknowledged the disconnect is the review. I had been down leveled in an acquisition and was doing a job 2 levels higher than my own, and he wanted to give me useful feedback and knew nobody would actually read it but me.
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phamilton 9y ago

I worked at Yahoo during a time of pseudo stack ranking (QPR). Managers had a target for average rating, and most managers would identify a few people for promotion and give everyone else "Meets Expectations" reviews so they could give the promotion candidates "Exceeds Expectations". Even worse, managers generally used the success of their reports as part of their success criteria, so they we're always actively trying to promote people because if they didn't then they weren't successful at their jobs. So managers would help that one or two people get promoted, even if they we're generally useless. And the other devs on the team would get ignored. It was a unique time in my career, when I had a performance review rating of "Exceeds Expectations" in a review that described my contributions as "mediocre". To be fair, my manager was actually pretty good and acknowledged the disconnect is the review. I had been down leveled in an acquisition and was doing a job 2 levels higher than my own, and he wanted to give me useful feedback and knew nobody would actually read it but me.

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