3 ms·
With 11 years of experience, maintaining a legacy system and writing docs does NOT sound like sr. level promo material to me. At <Equivalent BigCo>, sr. level p
by newobj 9y ago
With 11 years of experience, maintaining a legacy system and writing docs does NOT sound like sr. level promo material to me. At <Equivalent BigCo>, sr. level promo was tantamount to rearchitecting an existing product, leading a team in multiple-person-years development effort.
I appreciate the message around difficulty in quantifying impact, but just putting this into practical perspective, I think OP's manager may have failed to manage his expectations around what constitutes promo material.
- abvdasker 9y agoThat attitude is pretty illustrative of a larger problem. Maybe the work of bug fixing and maintenance of legacy systems is undervalued, which might explain why those systems get into such sorry shape to begin with at big companies like Google. My main takeaway from this piece is that it's easy for the incentive structure at big tech companies to get all out of whack. The most useful, most necessary work is often times not the work that benefits the employee most. This is pretty basic management 101 where you want to incentivize good behaviors by aligning the company's interests with those of the employees. When that incentive alignment is working it eliminates the need for employees to choose between the company and themselves. Everyone wins. When it isn't working you get stories like the author's — the individual becomes unhappy and leaves and the company loses a valuable employee.
- newobj 9y agoNot disagreeing just saying it sounds like his expectations were mis-managed. Whole story seems like a CF frankly and representative of the reasons why I've never even considered interviewing at Google.