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I'm a Googler, and while that might be true at another place, unfortunately this is not true at Google. Refactoring/Tech Debt/Eng Excellence work will not get y

I'm a Googler, and while that might be true at another place, unfortunately this is not true at Google. Refactoring/Tech Debt/Eng Excellence work will not get you promoted pass L4 for the majority of teams. In some team, it will get you to L5, but that's rare. Getting to L6 based on "1 yr refactor" is... simply extraordinary. I haven't seen or heard of one case in 7 years here.

naikrovek 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that the comment you replied to was talking about "the general rule" and not "the exception to the rule." you don't need to call out that your specific employer is different than other employers. everyone here already knew that.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  I’m guessing this was really just a way to brag about where they work. Seems oddly common among people that work at that company. For what it’s worth, I’ve been at more than a few companies and this lines up. Managing a refactor or migration that’s long term and creates significant impact across an org chart or product area is definitely in the purview of promotion to senior or staff, whatever it’s called.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Given that the tool mentioned in this thread, rf, is written by Russ Cox, who works at Google, to help refactor go, a language developed and maintained by Google, how Google addresses these things feels not totally irrelevant. I also think that "migration" and refactor are completely different concepts. And only the first is going to get you promoted (in the context of Google), because there's so much tooling for making even large refactoring relatively trivial. Pretty much every language has something like this, the build system also supports it too, so the process of, for example, taking a file, renaming it, querying and updating all dependencies (both source files and the build system), testing and sending out pull requests is essentially entirely automated. Unless there's something unique about a refactoring, it's not challenging enough to be promo-worthy.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Refactors are rarely as simple as moving a few file names or symbols around, at least where I work. While we do have some automation to help (and not break existing consumers), it’s significantly more involved in an SOA architecture for tier1 services. These sorts of big refactors also generally come with data model changes, performance profiling etc. This tool seems fantastic for parts of that, but not all of it. Just as a friendly aside, your tone seems strangely defensive (though this may just be my fault reading this tired at 3AM) - Levels tells me you make on the order of half a million a year, while I’ll be lucky to make half of that in the next decade at my employer, so you really can’t feel persecuted by this when you most likely work half as much as me while being rewarded for it while folks like me struggle to tread water and are considered mentally deficient.
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        > Refactors are rarely as simple as moving a few file names or symbols around, at least where I work. While we do have some automation to help (and not break existing consumers), it’s significantly more involved in an SOA architecture for tier1 services. These sorts of big refactors also generally come with data model changes, performance profiling etc. This tool seems fantastic for parts of that, but not all of it. Yes, I'd refer to that as a migration, which absolutely is a lot of effort, but a tool like this isn't going to be particularly helpful with a migration precisely because the majority of the effort with such a migration will be like...doing all the data stuff and traffic stuff. Changing the code is a minimal part. A refactor is often not a thing that even registers at a smaller company, because its on the scale of a few files. But "Large Scale Changes" are a thing when you end up having millions of lines of code (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrC6ROeV4GI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrC6ROeV4GI), and tools like this one are useful for those kinds of changes. But a single LSC won't get you promoted. And rf is neat, but in a very go way, it's not particularly exciting if you're familiar with https://github.com/google/pasta https://github.com/google/pasta or https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/blob/master/buildozer/README.md https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/blob/master/buildoz... or clangmr or https://github.com/google/Refaster https://github.com/google/Refaster, or outside of google Semgrep and Bowler and others, since its essentially the same, but built in go for go. > Just as a friendly aside, your tone seems strangely defensive (though this may just be my fault reading this tired at 3AM) Not at all. I was however, pointing out that "this was really just a way to brag about where they work. Seems oddly common among people that work at that company." was certainly unnecessary, and perhaps unkind.
omeze 5y ago
Sorry I should have clarified - by "refactoring APIs" I meant the sort of work that would e.g. be unifying all photo abstractions at Facebook behind a new service, not just refactoring package-level abstractions. That sort of work does involve a lot of symbol-level renaming and dependency hell management, but that's just a part of the work.
whateveracct 5y ago
yeah you gotta replace something in prod that already works perfectly fine - or release a greenfield feature and sunset it in 14mo lmaoo
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I feel like I've been involved in quite a few projects like that; Some Guy sold technology X to a company, so now it's all hands on deck. Over the years, one company I've worked for off and on (as a consultant/contractor) went from a jQuery UI library, to a CSS component library (which was fine), to an AngularJS component library, then some ex-googler (younger than me) swept in and became CTO or similar and Decided that the whole company should use, drumroll please, Polymer. Then Polymer 2 came around and they had to scramble to make everything Polymer 2 compatible. They were just about done when Polymer 3 came around, which did things Differently once again. But I'm sure the guy made decent scratch and left the company right before things came crashing down to an even more cushy job. That's usually what happens.
  - qaq 5y ago
    Does Google actually use Polymer much?
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      It does: https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using-Polymer%3F https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using-Polymer%... The whole idea of web components was somehow sold inside Google, hard. They even re-wrote Youtube with web components v0 which was almost immediately deprecated. And Chrome had to support it for years before Youtube rewrote stuff in v1.
      - ofrzeta 5y ago
        This is from 2018, though.
        5y ago
mattio 5y ago
Thanks for the insight.

naikrovek 5y ago

I'm pretty sure that the comment you replied to was talking about "the general rule" and not "the exception to the rule." you don't need to call out that your specific employer is different than other employers. everyone here already knew that.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
I’m guessing this was really just a way to brag about where they work. Seems oddly common among people that work at that company. For what it’s worth, I’ve been at more than a few companies and this lines up. Managing a refactor or migration that’s long term and creates significant impact across an org chart or product area is definitely in the purview of promotion to senior or staff, whatever it’s called.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Given that the tool mentioned in this thread, rf, is written by Russ Cox, who works at Google, to help refactor go, a language developed and maintained by Google, how Google addresses these things feels not totally irrelevant. I also think that "migration" and refactor are completely different concepts. And only the first is going to get you promoted (in the context of Google), because there's so much tooling for making even large refactoring relatively trivial. Pretty much every language has something like this, the build system also supports it too, so the process of, for example, taking a file, renaming it, querying and updating all dependencies (both source files and the build system), testing and sending out pull requests is essentially entirely automated. Unless there's something unique about a refactoring, it's not challenging enough to be promo-worthy.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Refactors are rarely as simple as moving a few file names or symbols around, at least where I work. While we do have some automation to help (and not break existing consumers), it’s significantly more involved in an SOA architecture for tier1 services. These sorts of big refactors also generally come with data model changes, performance profiling etc. This tool seems fantastic for parts of that, but not all of it. Just as a friendly aside, your tone seems strangely defensive (though this may just be my fault reading this tired at 3AM) - Levels tells me you make on the order of half a million a year, while I’ll be lucky to make half of that in the next decade at my employer, so you really can’t feel persecuted by this when you most likely work half as much as me while being rewarded for it while folks like me struggle to tread water and are considered mentally deficient.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > Refactors are rarely as simple as moving a few file names or symbols around, at least where I work. While we do have some automation to help (and not break existing consumers), it’s significantly more involved in an SOA architecture for tier1 services. These sorts of big refactors also generally come with data model changes, performance profiling etc. This tool seems fantastic for parts of that, but not all of it. Yes, I'd refer to that as a migration, which absolutely is a lot of effort, but a tool like this isn't going to be particularly helpful with a migration precisely because the majority of the effort with such a migration will be like...doing all the data stuff and traffic stuff. Changing the code is a minimal part. A refactor is often not a thing that even registers at a smaller company, because its on the scale of a few files. But "Large Scale Changes" are a thing when you end up having millions of lines of code (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrC6ROeV4GI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrC6ROeV4GI), and tools like this one are useful for those kinds of changes. But a single LSC won't get you promoted. And rf is neat, but in a very go way, it's not particularly exciting if you're familiar with https://github.com/google/pasta https://github.com/google/pasta or https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/blob/master/buildozer/README.md https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/blob/master/buildoz... or clangmr or https://github.com/google/Refaster https://github.com/google/Refaster, or outside of google Semgrep and Bowler and others, since its essentially the same, but built in go for go. > Just as a friendly aside, your tone seems strangely defensive (though this may just be my fault reading this tired at 3AM) Not at all. I was however, pointing out that "this was really just a way to brag about where they work. Seems oddly common among people that work at that company." was certainly unnecessary, and perhaps unkind.

omeze 5y ago

Sorry I should have clarified - by "refactoring APIs" I meant the sort of work that would e.g. be unifying all photo abstractions at Facebook behind a new service, not just refactoring package-level abstractions. That sort of work does involve a lot of symbol-level renaming and dependency hell management, but that's just a part of the work.

whateveracct 5y ago

yeah you gotta replace something in prod that already works perfectly fine - or release a greenfield feature and sunset it in 14mo lmaoo

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I feel like I've been involved in quite a few projects like that; Some Guy sold technology X to a company, so now it's all hands on deck. Over the years, one company I've worked for off and on (as a consultant/contractor) went from a jQuery UI library, to a CSS component library (which was fine), to an AngularJS component library, then some ex-googler (younger than me) swept in and became CTO or similar and Decided that the whole company should use, drumroll please, Polymer. Then Polymer 2 came around and they had to scramble to make everything Polymer 2 compatible. They were just about done when Polymer 3 came around, which did things Differently once again. But I'm sure the guy made decent scratch and left the company right before things came crashing down to an even more cushy job. That's usually what happens.
- qaq 5y ago
  Does Google actually use Polymer much?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    It does: https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using-Polymer%3F https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using-Polymer%... The whole idea of web components was somehow sold inside Google, hard. They even re-wrote Youtube with web components v0 which was almost immediately deprecated. And Chrome had to support it for years before Youtube rewrote stuff in v1.
    - ofrzeta 5y ago
      This is from 2018, though.
      - 5y ago

mattio 5y ago

Thanks for the insight.