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There have been some comments on here about how career advancement optimization at Google involves hopping between projects, staying long enough to launch, and
by ethbro 7y ago
There have been some comments on here about how career advancement optimization at Google involves hopping between projects, staying long enough to launch, and then moving on.
Whereas doing good work on product maintenance or evolution is much less rewarding.
True or not, it would explain a lot about how Google (as a whole) behaves towards products.
- dogprez 7y agoThat's not a Google only problem. It's a cultural problem in Silicon Valley (ex drive to disrupt) and America (ex not respecting stay-at-home parents). See the artwork of Mierle Laderman Ukeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles
- erik_seaberg 7y agoWhile I was there, we used to joke that the claimed strategy was “launch and iterate” but the career strategy was “launch and leave”. It’s made worse by internal churn. An unstaffed service will blow up pretty quickly (because someone in infra wanted to go for promo) so you either have to justify staffing a project indefinitely or kill it gracefully.
- lostmsu 7y agoFeels like someone higher up should walk through some of the now dead projects, and fire management team members, who wasted resources on those. Especially highly promoted and/or repeat offenders. Might actually spark some real innovation.