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I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people opti

I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when they are not performing.

the_local_host 6y ago
But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more". That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  I agree. Not sure he meant that. People are much more important than roles. If you have someone who is good but in a role that is not needed anymore, you'll find another role for them. Esp in big tech.
- theptip 6y ago
  The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the company change as the company grows, and people can’t keep up. Or people change and they can’t give what the company needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects of being a manager in a startup that’s growing quickly. The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build a data pipeline. In these cases you could say “they will figure it out”, and sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize that through no fault of their own, your employee now does not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find someone that does have those skills. This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee can’t grow with the role.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    > That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?
    - theptip 6y ago
      Maybe to some extent, but I’m not certain. If you are passionate about what you do, then you are probably not enjoying the job which shifted into not being a fit for your skill set, so the need to find someone else can be a mutual/positive conversation. It’s also really fraught with ego and self-worth landmines so it doesn’t always go that way.
      - dwohnitmok 6y ago
        There's a significant difference between being passionate about what you do and being passionate about the company/mission. A software developer might care immensely about the craft of software and the intricacies of tooling, programming languages, etc. but none at all about the company or mission, or a developer might care only about the company and view the craft of software as just the thing that happens to be most helpful for the company at the moment. Most people probably fall somewhere in the middle. I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter, because otherwise that employee is easily going to jump ship to a competitor or potentially not be an effective employee at all and get lost in the weeds of their craft rather than the mission. This sort of passion for the mission/company itself is also the impression I get from the article. And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company. I mean you can ask it and you may well succeed, but I would expect quite a few burned bridges along the way.
        theptip 6y ago
        > There's a significant difference between being passionate about what you do and being passionate about the company/mission. Absolutely. > I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter I think this depends on the company - size in particular seems very relevant. A lot of startups want their hires to be "mission driven", i.e. passionate about the company's objectives. This is more important if (like most startups) you're hoping for your hires to be generalists, and figure things out as they go along. In this scenario you can have meta-level "passionate about what you do" regardless of what the object-level task is (or more realistically, within a broad range of tasks that fall within your area of competence-but-not-expertise). But that's not as important as passion for the mission, and I do wonder if "passionate for whatever thing you're working on" is an oxymoron. In this situation I think your point is correct, the small companies want passion about the mission. One of the complaints in the OP was that Google employees are _not_ (as) mission-driven. My model here would be that at a big company, you're looking for a bunch of highly-specialized individuals that are effectively PhD-level experts in their field (not saying you completely discard/devalue generalists, but the trend is towards more specialists as you get bigger since you have more tasks that can actually keep a specialist busy full-time). For hiring/motivating specialists, you need to select for people that are passionate about the craft, not necessarily the mission. Not to mention if I understand correctly at the lower levels at least you tend to apply to a broad "Software engineer" role and get slotted in to a team, rather than applying specifically for a role in a specific subject area. I'm guessing the median Googler is substantially less mission-oriented than the median 10-person-startup engineer. Indeed to the extent that your mission is "boring" (I don't know many people that are excited by selling ads, for example) I suspect you want to actively select for people that are passionate about the craft, not the mission; these people will be happy with any mission, as long as they get to craft well. So for large companies I think I disagree with your theory about preferences between the two passions. Note with all of this -- you can still be a primarily mission-based small/growth startup, and have a situation where a skill mismatch emerges, and you need to replace someone. I don't think it's hypocritical to want your employees to be passionate about the mission, while also having the skills required to do the job, and recognize that sometimes your passionate and mission-driven employee is just not the right person for the role they are currently in. > And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company. Perhaps there is some hypocrisy if you are really encouraging passion about _the company_, and selling the "we are a family" story, and then turn around and terminate someone because you pivoted and no longer need them. I know some startups do this and it's a bit awkward. Your company may be close, but you're not a family. But I don't think "hires mission driven people" and "fires fast if there's a lack of fit" are mutually incompatible asks/expectations in general.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Exactly. It is natural when "human resources" treat their company as a "salary resource".
justapassenger 6y ago
> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality. Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.
- nqo 6y ago
  Was literally about to type this out. The issue of prioritizing promos over product value doesn't exist when delivering product value is what gets you promoted. If that's not the case, it's the fault of management and not the employee.
- tpudlik 6y ago
  He was the CEO of Waze, but not of Google. After the acquisition, he had to adopt Google promo processes.
viklove 6y ago
> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.
- moreranchplease 6y ago
  Exactly! Give people equity if you really want them to care about the product over what's best for their career.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  In the article he says this doesn't work because people effectively view equity as salary.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    And rightly so. Your google equity is absolutely disconnected from whatever product you are building there. External forces are more likely to affect it than anything you do personally.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. But this is the complete opposite of what people are saying in this thread.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes. No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person. What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his. Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I dunno, based on what you wrote about the process it sounds impossible to actually fire someone. Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average. Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own volition. I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority.
  - drclau 6y ago
    > they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no need to fire them.
- jstrong 6y ago
  you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1, returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was a bit over the top?
indeedmug 6y ago
Sometimes I find reading HN comment to be a bizarre experience because people seeming read an entirely different article than I did. All the article's author is saying that at large corporates the incentives are about personal promotion as opposed to delivering user experiences. He justifies this by saying that individual contributions get diluted in large organization. To me, this makes a lot of sense and is an interesting and thoughtful conversation. Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.

the_local_host 6y ago

But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more". That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.

tinyhouse 6y ago
I agree. Not sure he meant that. People are much more important than roles. If you have someone who is good but in a role that is not needed anymore, you'll find another role for them. Esp in big tech.
theptip 6y ago
The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the company change as the company grows, and people can’t keep up. Or people change and they can’t give what the company needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects of being a manager in a startup that’s growing quickly. The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build a data pipeline. In these cases you could say “they will figure it out”, and sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize that through no fault of their own, your employee now does not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find someone that does have those skills. This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee can’t grow with the role.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?
  - theptip 6y ago
    Maybe to some extent, but I’m not certain. If you are passionate about what you do, then you are probably not enjoying the job which shifted into not being a fit for your skill set, so the need to find someone else can be a mutual/positive conversation. It’s also really fraught with ego and self-worth landmines so it doesn’t always go that way.
    - dwohnitmok 6y ago
      There's a significant difference between being passionate about what you do and being passionate about the company/mission. A software developer might care immensely about the craft of software and the intricacies of tooling, programming languages, etc. but none at all about the company or mission, or a developer might care only about the company and view the craft of software as just the thing that happens to be most helpful for the company at the moment. Most people probably fall somewhere in the middle. I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter, because otherwise that employee is easily going to jump ship to a competitor or potentially not be an effective employee at all and get lost in the weeds of their craft rather than the mission. This sort of passion for the mission/company itself is also the impression I get from the article. And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company. I mean you can ask it and you may well succeed, but I would expect quite a few burned bridges along the way.
      - theptip 6y ago
        > There's a significant difference between being passionate about what you do and being passionate about the company/mission. Absolutely. > I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter I think this depends on the company - size in particular seems very relevant. A lot of startups want their hires to be "mission driven", i.e. passionate about the company's objectives. This is more important if (like most startups) you're hoping for your hires to be generalists, and figure things out as they go along. In this scenario you can have meta-level "passionate about what you do" regardless of what the object-level task is (or more realistically, within a broad range of tasks that fall within your area of competence-but-not-expertise). But that's not as important as passion for the mission, and I do wonder if "passionate for whatever thing you're working on" is an oxymoron. In this situation I think your point is correct, the small companies want passion about the mission. One of the complaints in the OP was that Google employees are _not_ (as) mission-driven. My model here would be that at a big company, you're looking for a bunch of highly-specialized individuals that are effectively PhD-level experts in their field (not saying you completely discard/devalue generalists, but the trend is towards more specialists as you get bigger since you have more tasks that can actually keep a specialist busy full-time). For hiring/motivating specialists, you need to select for people that are passionate about the craft, not necessarily the mission. Not to mention if I understand correctly at the lower levels at least you tend to apply to a broad "Software engineer" role and get slotted in to a team, rather than applying specifically for a role in a specific subject area. I'm guessing the median Googler is substantially less mission-oriented than the median 10-person-startup engineer. Indeed to the extent that your mission is "boring" (I don't know many people that are excited by selling ads, for example) I suspect you want to actively select for people that are passionate about the craft, not the mission; these people will be happy with any mission, as long as they get to craft well. So for large companies I think I disagree with your theory about preferences between the two passions. Note with all of this -- you can still be a primarily mission-based small/growth startup, and have a situation where a skill mismatch emerges, and you need to replace someone. I don't think it's hypocritical to want your employees to be passionate about the mission, while also having the skills required to do the job, and recognize that sometimes your passionate and mission-driven employee is just not the right person for the role they are currently in. > And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company. Perhaps there is some hypocrisy if you are really encouraging passion about _the company_, and selling the "we are a family" story, and then turn around and terminate someone because you pivoted and no longer need them. I know some startups do this and it's a bit awkward. Your company may be close, but you're not a family. But I don't think "hires mission driven people" and "fires fast if there's a lack of fit" are mutually incompatible asks/expectations in general.
Viliam1234 6y ago
Exactly. It is natural when "human resources" treat their company as a "salary resource".

justapassenger 6y ago

> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality. Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.

nqo 6y ago
Was literally about to type this out. The issue of prioritizing promos over product value doesn't exist when delivering product value is what gets you promoted. If that's not the case, it's the fault of management and not the employee.
tpudlik 6y ago
He was the CEO of Waze, but not of Google. After the acquisition, he had to adopt Google promo processes.

viklove 6y ago

> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.

moreranchplease 6y ago
Exactly! Give people equity if you really want them to care about the product over what's best for their career.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
In the article he says this doesn't work because people effectively view equity as salary.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  And rightly so. Your google equity is absolutely disconnected from whatever product you are building there. External forces are more likely to affect it than anything you do personally.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. But this is the complete opposite of what people are saying in this thread.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes. No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person. What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his. Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.

Aeolun 6y ago
I dunno, based on what you wrote about the process it sounds impossible to actually fire someone. Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average. Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own volition. I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority.
- drclau 6y ago
  > they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no need to fire them.
jstrong 6y ago
you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1, returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was a bit over the top?

indeedmug 6y ago

Sometimes I find reading HN comment to be a bizarre experience because people seeming read an entirely different article than I did. All the article's author is saying that at large corporates the incentives are about personal promotion as opposed to delivering user experiences. He justifies this by saying that individual contributions get diluted in large organization. To me, this makes a lot of sense and is an interesting and thoughtful conversation. Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.