4 ms·

> Their promo incentives favor short-term thinking. Can you please explain more?

karatinversion 6y ago
I have never worked for Google, but the story in previous similar discussions had been that Google’s performance reviews largely weigh launching new products to the exclusion of everything, so anyone who wants to get promoted can’t afford to “get stuck” maintaining an existing product without at least a significant rewrite.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Ah ok. I have heard that story as well.
- jakevoytko 6y ago
  This is basically true, although "to the exclusion of everything else" is more extreme than my experience. At the time I left ~5 years ago, it was common for promotion rejections to be given the explanation "the current thing that you're working on hasn't launched yet, so the promotion committee couldn't properly assess your impact. If you successfully launch it, that would clearly demonstrate impact." If you were a shoo-in via your existing work (i.e. you were obviously underpromoted), then it wouldn't matter as much. But since most people were trying to get promoted the instant they had a plausible case, it meant that a lot of people were focused on launching One Last Thing. Since I left, I understand that they've revamped the promotions up to Senior such that managers that are familiar with your work consider your promotion instead of a random committee. I'm curious to hear whether that has affected the "launch launch launch" push for promotions under staff engineer. I know through my network that staff+ promotions can still be held up for this reason.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Promotion "committee" ??
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Fairly normal in larger organizations, has been the case in my past 3 jobs. The idea is to reduce gamesmanship in promotion decisions (my whole team is senior engineers, etc.), and to provide some uniformity across the organization. They usually also have some budgetary discretion as well, as they have to balance whatever pool of money is available for promotions, COL adjustments, and merit based raises.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Fairly normal in larger organizations, has been the case in my past 3 jobs. I guess my last several orgs just kept that away from me then, for whatever reasons they had. It's honestly surprisingly new to me that "committees" for such a thing are "normal" at large orgs. In those cases, I had a lot of autonomy over promotions-as a leader, other than the usual "get approval from the CFO for funding if there is a raise involved"; beyond that, coordinating promotions with my director what the promotion would entail was all there was to it.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      Usually it's only involved on higher-level promotions (like, only 5% of less of engineers have ever had a promotion going through the committee), but it's fairly common to have a corporate promotion committee at companies larger than a few thousand employees.
rektide 6y ago
I don't have much information or much of an explanation. But it seems to me like there was a big push a couple years ago to integrate everything with G+. Someone collected the political capital inside the company to get this to be a mandate for the company, a direction for everyone to head. Well, it really wasn't that bad, but no the gangbusters success Google hoped for (not sure how anything with the flimsiest tiniest Read-Only api like that would ever get anywhere?). Since then it seems like there's a corporation, but mostly a lot of different teams marching to different drummers. It's pretty common in corporate world that managers & mini-executives & executives push for huge home run hits, within their fief, then leverage that smashing success to push for even bigger agendas. There's little incentive to maintain & care for a product well: everything is about metrics, & the existing user base's retention is usually not all that influenced by the love & care of a carefully thoughtfully evolved product. Trying to work across teams, to create something that works consistently across products, is even harder, as the organizational complexity of bringing more & more teams in keeps increasing. Organizational complexity grows. Teams seek autonomy & wins. Products get focus. Ecosystems & long-burning initiatives are much much much much harder to sheppard forward. Little of this is unique to Google.
kortilla 6y ago
Perf reviewers favor people that deliver new projects, not keeping the lights on in old ones.

I have never worked for Google, but the story in previous similar discussions had been that Google’s performance reviews largely weigh launching new products to the exclusion of everything, so anyone who wants to get promoted can’t afford to “get stuck” maintaining an existing product without at least a significant rewrite.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Ah ok. I have heard that story as well.
jakevoytko 6y ago
This is basically true, although "to the exclusion of everything else" is more extreme than my experience. At the time I left ~5 years ago, it was common for promotion rejections to be given the explanation "the current thing that you're working on hasn't launched yet, so the promotion committee couldn't properly assess your impact. If you successfully launch it, that would clearly demonstrate impact." If you were a shoo-in via your existing work (i.e. you were obviously underpromoted), then it wouldn't matter as much. But since most people were trying to get promoted the instant they had a plausible case, it meant that a lot of people were focused on launching One Last Thing. Since I left, I understand that they've revamped the promotions up to Senior such that managers that are familiar with your work consider your promotion instead of a random committee. I'm curious to hear whether that has affected the "launch launch launch" push for promotions under staff engineer. I know through my network that staff+ promotions can still be held up for this reason.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Promotion "committee" ??
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Fairly normal in larger organizations, has been the case in my past 3 jobs. The idea is to reduce gamesmanship in promotion decisions (my whole team is senior engineers, etc.), and to provide some uniformity across the organization. They usually also have some budgetary discretion as well, as they have to balance whatever pool of money is available for promotions, COL adjustments, and merit based raises.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Fairly normal in larger organizations, has been the case in my past 3 jobs. I guess my last several orgs just kept that away from me then, for whatever reasons they had. It's honestly surprisingly new to me that "committees" for such a thing are "normal" at large orgs. In those cases, I had a lot of autonomy over promotions-as a leader, other than the usual "get approval from the CFO for funding if there is a raise involved"; beyond that, coordinating promotions with my director what the promotion would entail was all there was to it.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    Usually it's only involved on higher-level promotions (like, only 5% of less of engineers have ever had a promotion going through the committee), but it's fairly common to have a corporate promotion committee at companies larger than a few thousand employees.

rektide 6y ago

I don't have much information or much of an explanation. But it seems to me like there was a big push a couple years ago to integrate everything with G+. Someone collected the political capital inside the company to get this to be a mandate for the company, a direction for everyone to head. Well, it really wasn't that bad, but no the gangbusters success Google hoped for (not sure how anything with the flimsiest tiniest Read-Only api like that would ever get anywhere?). Since then it seems like there's a corporation, but mostly a lot of different teams marching to different drummers. It's pretty common in corporate world that managers & mini-executives & executives push for huge home run hits, within their fief, then leverage that smashing success to push for even bigger agendas. There's little incentive to maintain & care for a product well: everything is about metrics, & the existing user base's retention is usually not all that influenced by the love & care of a carefully thoughtfully evolved product. Trying to work across teams, to create something that works consistently across products, is even harder, as the organizational complexity of bringing more & more teams in keeps increasing. Organizational complexity grows. Teams seek autonomy & wins. Products get focus. Ecosystems & long-burning initiatives are much much much much harder to sheppard forward. Little of this is unique to Google.

kortilla 6y ago

Perf reviewers favor people that deliver new projects, not keeping the lights on in old ones.