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The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite depressing. Why do this “pick me” dance when it’s completely within your control to get
by benjaminwootton 7y ago
The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite depressing.
Why do this “pick me” dance when it’s completely within your control to get the job you want within a few weeks?
By far the path of least resistance is simply to get a job and the promotion elsewhere.
Or do something entrepreneurial like this guy and completely tie your skills and abilities to the rewards.
As a talented engineer at Google the last thing I would ever consider to improve my lot is spending years playing this game.
- amznthrowaway5 7y agoYeah, if you keep your leetcode skills sharp and study to game the "design" interviews, you can get a job at a competing company instead of playing the depressing political game. As a bonus you'll make significantly more than internal promos.
- usaar333 7y agoMaybe up to senior levels (say T5). At some point, it becomes difficult to even keep your level, much less advance it. All said, I likewise would find it difficult as OP to work at a large company where local incentives can be so misaligned to the company's. Hence, the advantage of working at start-ups.
- tome 7y agoT5? On what scale is that? And where does it compare on https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Amazon,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Amazon,Google,Facebook...
- amznthrowaway5 7y agoL5 (Senior SWE) at Google, the position Michael was trying to get in the blog post.
- programmertote 7y agoA bit tangential, but wanted to ask if there's any pointer to learn/study how to best answer "design" interviews? Thank you!
- usaar333 7y agoGoogle around for tips. I found practice interviews on interviewing.io very useful
- knorker 7y ago> The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite depressing. Having experienced both, I'd say it's still infinitely better than this being a negotiation with your direct manager.
- amznthrowaway5 7y agoCan you go into more detail about what happened in your situations?
- tyingq 7y agoI've had the opposite experience. With some exceptions, It's not that hard to figure out how to win over one person. Even if they are a terrible manager, you get a sense of what they consider important. Figuring out the dynamics of a committee is harder.
- izacus 7y agoThis sounds like a feature, not a bug - it prevents extroverts who suck up to a boss always stepping over introverts who do a better job.
- tyingq 7y agoWell, yes, but I'd rather not depend on a fair system. That's rare and often fleeting.
- vxNsr 7y agoAnd yet in one short article the OP perfectly summed up who google sucks at making long term software that continues to work. People often say that google rewards for new projects and ideas vs maintaining the old, I didn’t really understand what that meant until he explained it here. Doing good work is meaningless, the only that matters is what some faceless committee thinks. What’s odd is that the committee doesn’t look at code quality, maintainability or longevity. They don’t care about documentation at all apparently because it’s not a quantifiable metric. And yet if you asked any engineer they would all say they’d rather work with documented code vs undocumented. It would ave them time and allow them to fix things faster. The fact that google is trying to turn everyone into a quantified machine is making the whole org very sick.
- dominotw 7y agoAcutally that process seems more fair to me. Your direct managers only promote you if they don't see you as a threat to themselves.
- m0zg 7y agoThere's a twist to this. Once you reach the "senior" level, you don't have to "play the game" anymore. You're pretty well compensated, the requirements to get to the next level are stratospheric, so you could just stay a T5 forever. Although it'll gnaw on you that your former engineering peers who have switched to management seem to have a much easier time going up the ladder, even though they suck mightily as managers, and it's not clear to anyone (including themselves) what they actually do.
- dadoge 7y agoLol As a senior engineer at a big tech co, can agree with this. I switched teams recently and the new manager asked me what my career plans were and said “oh you think the packet you made to get a senior level is big, a staff eng needs like X number of pages and they are only N number of engs in the company”. Talk about hitting a wall.