36 ms·

The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

• baby 4y ago
  The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion. Everybody becomes "fake friend".
  • cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Were strict hierarchies really that bad? It seems that just about anything else devolves into an ontological mess of Byzantine proportions. At one stage in my career I was reporting to 4 different bosses in this weird interleaved hypercube topology. I spent most of my time giving status updates
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • derbOac 4y ago
      I do think more democratic, less hierarchical systems can work well if they're implemented in the right way. I saw a shift from that, where it was functioning well, to something more hierarchical and everything play out as this blog post is criticizing. It became really clear very quickly how aims shifted from more institutional mission-statement-type goals to promotion criteria and personal power agendas. There's a limit I guess, but sometimes having multiple people to report to can lead to checks and balances.
    • arethuza 4y ago
      I once had a similar situation and seriously contemplated building an application to manage my status updates so I could enter the raw data once and have all N people who needed to be updated sent the right information in the right way at the right time....
      • Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        This is a great idea!
        • avianlyric 4y ago
          I think someone already built it… and called it Jira.
    • trelane 4y ago
      Seems like if your boss is a receptacle for status updates, the company is doing management wrong. Sure, it works less bad with one, but that doesn't mean it's good.
    • svachalek 4y ago
      At least for performance reviews it's so much easier. If your boss hates you for some reason, that sucks, but you can just move on. It's a lot simpler than trying to please a dozen different people simultaneously though.
    • banannaise 4y ago
      I have a scrum master, a product owner, a tech lead, and a team manager. All four of those are management relationships, but only 1.5 are hierarchal (the manager and sort of the tech lead). The most effective and efficient relationships we have, IMO, are with the scrum master and product owner, who aren't above us in a hierarchy. There's no inherent reason for management to be hierarchically superior. If you want productive relationships, you have to level the power dynamic more.
  • derbOac 4y ago
    Phwewww... this blog post and all these comments ring so true to me way outside of contexts resembling software development or business that it seems to me it's getting at something very fundamental. A corollary to this in my opinion is that if promotion is expected at some point, I think the business/organization/institution has a responsibility to try to facilitate people moving toward that through mentoring or at least clear expectations. If nothing else, it makes the expectations clear, which clarifies how those might be at odds with other goals such as what the blog poster is articulating.
  • colonelxc 4y ago
    The "nobody dares giving bad feedback" thing isn't about retaliation (though I suppose that could happen). It's because perf is actually the worst place to provide "honest" feedback to a person about their performance. It's complaining to managers/directors instead of talking to the person themselves (the recipient wont get to read your feedback for a couple months after). Even if you want to talk to a manager about some performance concerns, you should do that directly, instead of putting it in a record that sticks around for a persons whole employment It's a bureaucracy game, and people who give bad feedback don't know how to play. (I'm not endorsing the system at all, just rejecting the idea of it being retaliation-based. Anybody giving bad feedback doesn't understand what is going on)
    • Forge36 4y ago
      Oh. I think I understand my work culture now. Thank you.
    • icedchai 4y ago
      I worked at a place that did perf reviews every 6 months. 360 degree style, where you got manager feedback and a bunch of peers that you nominated. None of the feedback I received was ever actionable or useful. None of the feedback I gave was ever really useful, either! People rated you on a bunch of silly, vaguely described sliding scales from 1 to 5, then answered a couple of equally vague questions. It probably distracted people for 3 or 4 days, every 6 months. All I ever got was stuff like "Joe writes excellent design documents! His code is always well tested. I always want Joe on my projects!" I'd write stuff like "Amy is extremely effective at solving problems with <blah> API's, and is a great communicator. She should do a brown bag session about her experience with <blah>." The reviews were all fluff. Some people wouldn't put in any effort at all, and write one liners. Seriously, one of my reviews was "Just keep on being Joe!" Thanks, but why bother? The review process at most companies is a big waste of time and money.
      • coredog64 4y ago
        I gave a coworker honest feedback during our 360 review period and now I feel bad.
  • chestervonwinch 4y ago
    > The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. Raising up and increasing the productivity of your peers sounds like a good thing. I think I'm missing how this is a bad outcome due to a perverse incentive. Are you saying the value extracted from peers is not real value or that the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more important business goals?
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      Your peers are rewarded for accomplishing their goals. In the best-case scenario, the incentive is to find ways to synergize your goals so you are all benefitting. In the common-case scenario, you figure out how to bribe / cajole / coerce them into putting time in on your project and don't really care about how things are going on their project, because we're all responsible engineers who can time-manage ourselves, right? So you get your promotion and they get screwed because the work they did to deliver on something valuable to the company isn't reflected in their OKRs. It degenerates what should be a collective goal of accomplishing the company's objectives the best way possible into a slotting game of making sure you're always listed on paper as being on the right project, because your work won't have value if you applied it outside your bullpen.
      • ylou 4y ago
        No good deed goes unpunished. No decent coworker goes unexploited.
    • ertian 4y ago
      > the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more important business goals? It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy of a higher-level engineer. Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers, improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can add significant value to the company...but they won't be rewarded for it, because the perf process considers those to be simple, the domain of lower-level employees. What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company. Of course, people with those planning and communication skills are really valuable to a company. But somebody also has to do the work. Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet. And a lot of effective engineers getting frustrated and quitting because they don't want to spend their days working on slide shows. It feels to me like the people in charge of the perf process just tend to overemphasize their own strengths and skills. Kinda by definition, the people designing the system are going to be senior people who are interested in communication and process, so that's what they look for in others. If they were the kinds of people who were interested in identifying and solving particularly devious or consequential issues on their own (or as part of one of their peer's projects), they wouldn't be working on the promo process in the first place.
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    The whole point of a tech company is to pay engineers $X and find a way for them to create some over-unity multiple of $X in value. If the problem is “this incentivizes engineers to make each other deliver more value”, that sounds like not a problem (and opens everyone up for increasing $X). It’s a problem when you start to see your fellow employees as the competition instead of your actual competitors being the competition.
    • ShamelessC 4y ago
      It's a problem for people who value working on things that actually get used for more than a few years and aren't duplicate efforts to make some line on some graph go up somewhere. These are of course people, after all. Not robots.
  • kps 4y ago
    > The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion. It's good to have people who understand the difference between the prisoners' dilemma and the iterated prisoners' dilemma.
• goolulusaurs 4y ago
  When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent to which they pervade practically every human institution.
  • MattGaiser 4y ago
    There would need to be something big to override individual interest.
    • defen 4y ago
      Historically this was achieved via religion. Small-to-medium size startups can sometimes pull it off with the concept of a "mission", although that's probably less effective these days since everyone wants to "change the world". I think someone would have to be pretty naive to have a similar level of belief in the mission of a multinational corporation. Or they're high enough in the org chart that they don't have to worry about anything else.
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    It is very instructive to read Deming and Weber. Max Weber pretty much defined the modern conceit of bureaucracy. [1] W.E Deming wrote extensively on the "American Disease". [2] In a few words management and measurement are both inescapable beyond a certain organisational size, and they are the problem, because in almost all scenarios they will expand to displace/strangle the actual work. It is a recognised general structural problem in systems. Of course there is much more to it than the above simplification which may sound like an extreme philosophy - but I have yet to encounter good refutations or counterexamples to this tendency. The answer, perhaps, is that small and many is beautiful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
    • goolulusaurs 4y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation. I am a big fan of Weber, not familiar with Deming but his work sounds very relevant. In general I tend to agree that beyond a certain size organization these problems seem unavoidable. I've read Systemantics/The Systems Bible and it seems to come to a similar conclusion.
• fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  Most promotions I've seen are when someone has a huge amount of tribal knowledge about some system and the company cannot afford to have them leave. So they get promoted. This is even within FAANG, where this narrative about impact or 10x developers is common. Not saying promotions dont happen for those reasons, just that huge systems that few people understand lead to promotions for those who do understand them
  • thematrixturtle 4y ago
    Not really? Promos incentive "up and out" culture, where people switch teams after getting promoted. Machiavellian managers respond by not promoting their best people, instead forever dangling the carrot of "deliver this and get promoted next cycle!".
    • fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
      100%, have worked at two FAANGs and this is what I have seen. Complex business knowledge leads to promotions
    • strongpigeon 4y ago
      “You got a really high CME this cycle” is the meme du jour I’ve heard
  • surement 4y ago
    This is very common! What's worse is these engineers likely created or at least contributed to a situation where tribal knowledge is valuable, rather than developing simple decoupled systems that can be picked up by new engineers.
    • heavenlyblue 4y ago
      Yeah it’s your usual “hire a bunch of underpaid and under skilled-for-the-job” “engineers” at the beginning of your startup that write piles of crap code that then become knowledge pullers of the business. When if you paid good money in the first place you wouldn’t need that knowledge in the first place.
• leros 4y ago
  I used to manage engineers at another large tech company and this was a big problem. There was nowhere near enough big projects to get everyone the evidence they needed for promotions. As a result we ended up doing two things a lot: 1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of services that could have just been a feature in an existing service) 2) de-prioritizing important things that were small in order to ensure everyone had a big project every quarter. We ended up having to hire contractors to work on the small stuff because it was piling up and causing problems.
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    > 1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of services that could have just been a feature in an existing service) Ideally this gets people fired, not promoted. Google explicitly calls out "solutions to hard problems are easy to maintain" on its ladder, for example. People can fail to identify these cases, but the intention is to promote based on hard problems rather than complex solutions.
    • meowtimemania 4y ago
      I think there just aren’t enough reasonably solvable hard problems. All the low hanging fruit is taken, and the result is artificially complex solutions as a way for engineers to demonstrate craftsmanship.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem? Should someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug? I've seen real bugs that bounce around for months, each time to someone who looks decides it isn't in their code and points to someone else: eventually we tell one engineer to solve it an a few weeks latter she traces it down through many different layers to figure it out. I've seen other cases where a great engineer spent weeks fixing bugs only slightly more complex a misspelling. In the end what counts it the quality of the product not the effort put into it.
• Arainach 4y ago
  This all sounds nice but it's missing the concrete details and that's the most important part. "Build into core values wanting to create a culture where the end-user is the priority, not individual advancement up the ladder" Is there any non-exploitative way to interpret this? The only thing worse than wasting my time on features for promo rather than users is working overtime to make more money for those with significant equity/ownership in ways that will never seriously affect my comp. Without promo or "promo by a different name" i.e. money, how do you incentivize people? How do you decide who to allocate your finite equity and money to?
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    Why combine two problems working overtime without compensation and promotion focused culture?
    • Arainach 4y ago
      A culture where I'm supposed to be working for "the user" rather than for my own benefit is inherently exploitative. Employment is a contract. If I stop delivering value, the company will fire me. As they say, the reward for being good at your job is more work. Expecting me to put in top effort for "the users" without compensating me doesn't work. The idea that you can fix this with culture is wrong. It's been tried many times at many companies and it doesn't work for anyone but the owners. Unless you own a significant (let's say >5%) piece of the company, those late nights you work for "the user" will never be worth it to you.
      • mhss 4y ago
        > As they say, the reward for being good at your job is more work. Expecting me to put in top effort for "the users" without compensating me doesn't work. You do not work for free. You are being paid. 'Top effort' needs not to translate to working overtime, more hours, etc.
        • Arainach 4y ago
• syndacks 4y ago
  In other words, "hire people who want to work hard for the founders at the expense of their self-promotion".
  • MattGaiser 4y ago
    If job posts were honest, they would say "our ideal candidate is a martyr."
  • jpm_sd 4y ago
    Or incentivize them with a form of profit-sharing that isn't tied to "promotion" per se?
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  Some ideas: hire fewer people, well remunerated, but make normal pay increments guaranteed and promotions less frequent. Then there isn't such a glut of new engineers constantly creating an "up or out" culture, and people aren't laser-focused on promotion to win big. And lower the early 3 years' RSU allocations. Basically, turn it into a marathon not a sprint.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• angarg12 4y ago
  It gets worse than promo-driven development. Recently we had a chat with a lead from another team. Their product has a lot of similarities with ours so we sync up every now and then to bounce ideas off each other. They recently release a big change that we thought didn't provide much value, so we asked him about it. His candid answer was "you know how it works, we have a service running in production, so we need to make changes". This sounds simple, but the implications are deep. Unlike individual engineers, moving entire teams around is difficult. If you have a team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is not enough to keep the lights on or slowly polish the product, you need grand roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or two. Ideally you want to justify that you need extra headcount to keep the product expanding.
  • mirntyfirty 4y ago
    I think this is one of the key frustrations I have with modern software development, change for the sake of change. I feel as though many products degrade over time and as a user I’m generally quite hesitant to upgrade anything if I don’t have to.
    • oicU00 4y ago
      They have to show on investor calls the line went up. We’re propping up the wealth of a generation that has no idea how anything works, but they got there first so of course they are now the de facto deciders of our agency.
      • mirntyfirty 4y ago
        True, it’s difficult to know how things work when they become needlessly complicated and one is unable to move on from a project that is essentially complete.
        • oicU00 4y ago
          It’s presumed needlessly complicated is necessary to make the line go up; behind the scenes, they say, mathmagical forces exist that only the chosen few truly understand. You see everything is really a graph of infinite brand names, and the flow of value is determined by the taxonomy of brand ownership. Many a study have been attempted to quantify what character qualities or technologies boost productivity. Their model becomes so nebulous no reasonable conclusions can be made. But now of course computers learning helps us untangle that web and low and behold the same economic winners emerged! Wow!
• analyst74 4y ago
  The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable. All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires? In order to reduce time spent on perf, you'd have to rely on a few people who knows an employee's work instead of a larger peer group and committee. The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others. This leads to a different set of problems, like "B player hires C player", yes-man culture, ICs spending effort brown nosing instead of creating value, etc. Building a culture is all about incentives, it's easy to identify and reward user/company impact when the team is small. But as number grows, it becomes harder to do that, and the declared core values gets ignored as the reward system departs from that.
  • em-bee 4y ago
    i remember reading in some startup oriented text that founder driven values works up to about 50 people. once your company grows beyond that a culture shift is inevitable. i don't know what the answers are to manage that shift and avoid it going into the wrong direction.
    • sg47 4y ago
      Should avoid hiring people from big companies that are used to promotions every year.
      • compiler-guy 4y ago
        No big company I know of, certainly no FAANG, anyone expecting to be promoted every year. Even every two years would be considered quite fast.
        • saalweachter 4y ago
          Doesn't Microsoft bump levels ~yearly?
    • 4y ago
• burnoutgal 4y ago
  Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast? There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a ton of work for no benefit. I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely boring and dysfunctional, but then I realized I can just disengage and enjoy my extra free time instead of pushing to exceed expectations. And I still get paid the same.
  • water-your-self 4y ago
    Try having a family as a sole earner on 200k in the bay area. Or new york.
    • ahtihn 4y ago
      Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.
      • burnoutgal 4y ago
        But you need a house with a backyard, two teslas, a wine cellar and a college fund or you aren't really living /s
      • aroman 4y ago
        In San Francisco, the median household income was $120k. That’s 2 years ago mind you, and a lot of inflation has occurred since then. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia
        • bradlys 4y ago
          Doesn’t account for the fact that many are under rent control, own houses from decades ago, etc. It’s better to look at the average incomes of people who are buying houses in SF.
• kodah 4y ago
  There's just a lack of ability to own a product as an engineer. Those things are delegated to managers and product owners; lead engineers are really just there to align work - not really to make broad vision beyond suggestions. If engineering firms wanted to improve they'd ensure that everyone who has decision making power over a product, whether from a business or technical perspective, is at the same level and has the same input. That way refactor is weighed the same as a new feature or service.
• billsmithaustin 4y ago
  At my previous employer, every quarter we were supposed to update an elaborate spreadsheet describing how we measured up against the numerous criteria for the next level on the career ladder. I hated it. That said, there were lots of people who obsessed over the process, looking for shortcuts or ways to game the system.
• sna1l 4y ago
  I think the problem with the promotion culture is that you can't demote someone after they've been promoted. If you just focus on showing impact and cross team projects, your engineers will naturally build more complex projects than needed to hit those targets. The key is to track the long term maintainability and quality of the systems built. E.g. time to land diffs, incidents, performance metrics, etc. If a system starts to quickly fail these things or don't last then it is a pretty good sign that the project wasn't actually built well. Things aren't always under a single person's control but a lot of people will work on a big complex (seemingly good) project and then bounce after they've gotten their promo. I do think there is a balance though because at a lot of startups the incentive is to just crank out a lot of product code but not really think about multiplier type work.
• nineplay 4y ago
  My experience has been that some companies pressure engineers to want to advance. If you come into a performance review and say "actually I'm happy where I am" it's seen as a lack of motivation and will count as a mark against you. I had a boss say to me "I always want to move to the next level and I expect the same of my reports". Whatever, I guess I'm a poor employee because I like my job.
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    I’ve openly stated that I want my retirement job to be an SWE3-ish role somewhere. High enough to have interesting, somewhat challenging work, but with negative desire to climb the ranks any further.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      Problem with that is due to inflation, you're making less and less compensation every year. Standard "you're doing a good job" raises often do not meet inflation, and certainly are not right now where inflation is higher than the recent historical mean. This is not a problem for some people, maybe including you, but I think most people have a general vague career expectation of making more when they're 60 than they make when they're 50, than they make when they're 40, and so on--even if they don't plan to be an overachieving "ladder climber".
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        I may have been unclear. By retirement job, I meant a job that I took during (read: after) retirement, not the one I’d walk away from at the moment of retiring. At that point, financial arrangements are presumably already all set.
      • throwaway_1928 4y ago
        You can always move to the same level in a different company to readjust your pay.
      • Firmwarrior 4y ago
• mwcampbell 4y ago
  > and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well. I can honestly say I didn't care about promotion while I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft (as a Software Engineer II). The quoted assertion makes me wonder if I was being naive or lazy. I truly believed that I didn't need to care about promotion because the work I was doing was worthwhile for its own sake, i.e. I cared about the product and the users. In retrospect, maybe I didn't make the most of the opportunity I had there; I suppose I could have had more impact if I had leveled up. But I wasn't thinking that way at the time.
  • toast0 4y ago
    The way I looked at it was: if I'm being paid enough, I care about being happy more than being paid more. Jumping through hoops to get promoted is going to get me more money and also make me do more stuff I don't want to do. I was happiest when I had a clear, important job to do, that everyone knew wasn't enough work for one person, and then the expectation that I'd spend the rest of the time fixing stuff that was nobody's job and freedom to set priorities for the most part (after all, if it was important, it should be somebody's job). Of course, at the last place, I think they have four engineers now doing my important job that left me mostly idle. Not sure how four people can work on it, but not my circus. I briefly had one person reporting to me (well two people, in sequence), and navigating performance reviews on behalf of someone else is not for me.
• epaulson 4y ago
  This is only sort-of related, but a while back there was a beautiful Twitter thread, I think about Google product managers or engineering leaders, who come into a product, revamp a bunch of features and come up with metrics to show that they were successful with it in the short term, and then use that as the case for their promotion and time it just right so they can disengage and bail over to the next product, just before all of the short-term decisions they made blew up and hurt the original product. The punchline of the tweet thread was that they move on to the next product - and the final tweet in the thread looped back to the first tweet in the thread. Does anyone remember this thread?
  • llaolleh 4y ago
    That is hilarious. It's a real life example of catastrophic forgetting.
  • feintruled 4y ago
    A co-worker of mine described this as 'surfing ahead of the wave of responsibility'
    • panda88888 4y ago
      This is great. I am going to borrow it.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Reminds me of the parable of three envelopes
    • biztos 4y ago
      For anyone else who didn’t know that one: https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/ https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
  • fhrow4484 4y ago
    is it this one? https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1440138354390016003 https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1440138354390016003
• llaolleh 4y ago
  My take on these BigCos is that there is so much middle management and hierarchy that the frontline workers are blocked from the actual performance of the company. My proposed fix is entire product groups and their members should be held accountable and directly take profit of what they earn. If the product does well that quarter, engineers should be rewarded. Something to keep them working on a great product rather than catastrophically forgetting.
  • mikepurvis 4y ago
    That works in sales, where one salesperson runs the whole engagement and can clearly claim responsibility for the revenue and thus be directly compensated with a proportion of it. But in engineering you need people to be thinking big picture, thinking collaboratively, taking risks, doing long term development, cleaning up technical debt. If you overly tie compensation to product revenue, you risk incentivizing your entire engineering staff toward short-term bolt-on-the-feature thinking.
  • stormbeard 4y ago
    What about infrastructure teams? Not all work is product work.
• xoofoog 4y ago
  Former Googler here. This person has correctly identified that a key reason why google sucks is that people very often... > choose between doing what’s best for users or what’s best for their career But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an existing system was somehow on par with building a new system (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something perfectly good). The googler would say "well those useful problems are too easy to merit a promotion. Anybody can solve easy problems - we're google, and we're too smart to work on those easy problems." Grow up. Y'all value the wrong things. That's why your culture is broken.
  • mochomocha 4y ago
    A friend of mine didn't get a promotion at Google because he was told that though his work generated >1B of revenues for the company, it was not "hard enough". He left the company.
    • SystemOut 4y ago
      This was one of the primary reasons I left. I had a project that enabled more than 100M+ increased revenue globally and the sales teams it impacted loved my work. But it wasn't considered hard enough or technically challenging work by engineering leadership so I got CME. That was it for me.
      • ScoobleDoodle 4y ago
        What does CME stand for? Thank you for sharing your experience.
        • murderfs 4y ago
          Consistently Meets Expectations, one step up from "you are probably going to get fired" (needs improvement)
• protomyth 4y ago
  So, if you have a company that depends on uptime, then pay the people doing the maintenance programming / sysadmin twice as much as the normal developers since they don't get to play with the new thing, they are much more likely to have to deal with things at odd hours, and need to be promoted based on keeping the business running.
• es7 4y ago
  When I was at Google this was a huge problem. I worked on features/products that could be built and supported by small teams. Once those projects were ‘done’, those same teams inevitably turned to unnecessary rewrites, expansions and redesigns. And they all got promoted for it. For turning a 5-person project into a 25 person project that did the same thing, but with more moving pieces. Because you can’t usually reach L6 by maintaining a project, no matter how impactful.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  The first thing that comes to mind reading this is that 'corporate ladder' is the wrong visual concept. Corporate hierarchies are trees with root at the top. The problem is then comparable to the academic world, where each PI will have a series of PhD students who themselves want to become PIs, but the PI replacement rate is too low to accomodate this. Unless the global academic world is expanding, inevitably the majority of PhDs will not become PIs. One general solution is to flatten the hierarchy, which ultimately would reduce the spread in compensation and rewards from the bottom layer to the top layer. This would make promotion somewhat less attractive particularly if it came with heavier administrative responsibilities (generally less fun and more hassle).
• sandGorgon 4y ago
  serious question here - how does Apple deal with this problem ? Apple also survives on big bang releases - the next iphone, macbook pro, etc etc. But also is famous for not abandoning old phones. iphone 6 was still receiving updates in Dec 2021. so how does Apple manage this dichotomy ? or is the company level yearly release completely wipe out the need for individual "hard problem" solving ?
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    Does Apple even promote on solving "hard" problems?
  • astrange 4y ago
    Traditionally they made it ungameable by making it completely opaque to the point where you have no input on promotions and they may not even tell you there is something called promotions.
• xoofoog 4y ago
  • osipov 4y ago
  • klipt 4y ago
    Seems pretty sexist to associate solving hard problems with masculinity. Women at Google also work on hard problems.
    • cvhashim 4y ago
      Should have just said toxic humanistic traits
      • ctvo 4y ago
        Toxic masculinity accurately represents what the OP describes and is clear here. There's nothing to be offended about. It's revealing the angst that sprang up from this community of mostly men.
        • lliamander 4y ago
          Classic Bulverism on display. Don't defend your position, just assume you're right and offer an armchair pyscho-analysis for why people who disagree with you are wrong.
          • ctvo 4y ago
            Here's some more Bulverism: What's there to defend? Colloquially toxic masculinity means exactly what the OP was going for. It's to jockey for power, position, and status at the expense of others (and often detrimental to their own goals). Hey! Women sometimes also display these toxic masculine traits commonly found in male primates! You should be more inclusive and call it toxic humanity! has to be one of the least useful things you can bring to the overall discussion.
• kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  Can we now, finally, stop thinking that everything Google does is smart? In the 90s, everyone wanted to copy Microsoft culture. Maybe we just always need to have one company that’s worshipped.
• babl-yc 4y ago
  I wonder how much newer trends of transparent career ladders are at play here. The old way wasn't perfect either, but generally high performance was rewarded with broader scope. I assumed hard, high quality work was the way to get promoted. Now with many public career ladders, employees realize they should take on broader scope (larger, complex projects) to look the part of a more senior engineer, even if that doesn't match their team's immediate needs.
• ducttapecrown 4y ago
  An interesting way of looking at this is that it's the Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle Also called the tragedy of the commons.
  • astrange 4y ago
    It's obvious why these mid-century SF authors like Pournelle and Heinlein wrote all these cool-sounding aphorisms - that's their job - but it's not clear why anyone listens to what a grumpy old conservative SF author thinks.
• lesgobrandon 4y ago
• iffe_closure 4y ago
  I work at Google and the who promotion culture is very toxic. People are incentivized to "Launch" things just in time to get promo and only to abandon it or switch teams in search of the next promo. It also gets hypercompetitive and harms teamwork sometimes. The promotions are usually B.S. anyway, they add stress and usually remove a good functioning engineer from doing good work into more "non technical leadership" work. The Truth is, people really want promos for the extra money and more stock. I say, just give them the extra money and stock privately, and only promote people when there's a job to be filled for that position.
  • tfp137 4y ago
    The dual-ladder system exists to fix something that is broken but ends up breaking it more. In essence, there's the E9/O1 problem. An elite engineer with 25 years of experience simply knows more than an entry-level manager. Organizations try to solve this by dual-laddering and saying that there are "Director-equivalent" engineers (e.g. Staff or Principal) and so on, to rectify the obvious injustice of a scenario where a fresh MBA is seen to outrank the best engineers because he manages a team and they don't. The problem is that this dual-laddering makes it worse, because it's so much harder to move up the engineering ladder. If you're a Software Manager I at Google, you have to shit five or six different beds not to make Director within ~6 years and VP within ~12. On the other hand, making Principal+ Engineer is quite difficult, especially if you're not in MTV. So it perpetuates a false equivalency in which the managerial and product folk are gods (because of their swift, easy promotions) while most of the engineers are leftovers.
    • thewarrior 4y ago
      How can every single manager become a director ? That seems impossible.
      • nickm12 4y ago
        It can happen for a while with large year-over-year headcount growth + manager attrition. But eventually, the music stops.
• darioush 4y ago
  In my experience most of the perf-review is a show. Promos typically have a "pecking order", determined by how long you have been asking for one (or performing at the next level if you have some meritocracy), the amount of budget available for promos this time, your age (easier to promote "mature" people), D&I status, proximity of ethnicity to your managers biases (could be implicit, doesn't matter for the outcome), height (tall people promoted easier), introversion vs. extroversion, and just if your manager likes you. Also they ask you to give vague, subjective snippets that will be weaponized against your colleagues in form of "feedback" for the next 6-18 months. So it's better to not partake in this type of time wasting activity.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  Half of me wishes we just got rid of titles and just adjusted pay based on the value perceived/demonstrated to the company YoY. People would probably be more inclined to work harder and on more challenging stuff if their comp was more outcome driven like a sales type role. Incentives make people do the weirdest stuff. It becomes pure politics at a certain point and largely a cool kids club of who you know to sponsor you and being generally well-liked. I'm not going to kiss ass for a title. I'm going to demonstrate I earned it the hard way. While most companies don't recognize that path as much anymore, it's not very hard to get the title at another company. The people who bring the most value to each team are often the unsung heroes who don't get promoted fast either. Good leaders will take notice however. The book "Staff Engineer" by Will Larson has some good bits on this topic.
• sytelus 4y ago
  Promo-culture cannot be ignored because with each level, your total compensation often increases by 50-100% at many big tech. You can absolutely expect people to alter their actions to whatever promo-culture demands. As the article says, one answer is to simply align the incentives which is to make promos based on customer satiesfaction and adoption. The issue is this: when you release new product, your adoption/satiesfaction/revenue increases infinitely because denominator is zero. Often media blitz follows which raises the profiles of small team and increasing their market value than usual bug fixer. The new learning experiences of new-product teams and ability to do aggresive hustle on impossible schedules also adds into their market value relative to Joe, the minor feature developer. These people become important because one of the growth criteria for big tech is ability to diversity, aka, release new products and excite the hopeful investors. So companies are forced to associate product releases with promos. Current promo-culture at big tech is not a bug but a feature. I think very few understand this dynamics. There is one extremely bad aspect of promo-culture not discussed in the article: Many promos in higher level have requirement that the person must become the people manager. The idea is that at certain pay level you must be able to "scale" you impact by directing others as opposed to doing things by yourself. In tech, this is extraordinarily flawed idea. Scale can be achieved by being manager but also by being individual contributor. People like Jeff Dean has contributed far more as IC than probably most VPs at Google. I don't know how many brilliant technical ICs have killed themselves by trying to be people manager to get that alluring promo.
• at_a_remove 4y ago
  Another issue is that "promotion" can mean any number of things which someone may desire or not care about. This "promotion" may mean a private office, more flexibility with your time, more money, respect, control over what you work on, meetings with higher-ups, direct reports, and so forth. Not everyone wants all of these things in a single bundle.
• jeffbee 4y ago
  There sure is a thriving subculture of telling people how to not repeat the "mistakes" of an 1800-billion-dollar organization.
• digitalgangsta 4y ago
  What often happens when an employee doesnt get promoted? they leave and usually are able to get that next level role in another company. Why is that?? Why does the current company require employees to show a track record and data points to be promoted, while they hire externally for the same position and often only look at resumes, interview and maybe an assessment. Why isnt it the same bar for internal vs external. I think promotions to the next level should just be considered a new job (in the same company), and you don't 'win it' or get promoted - instead you apply for it and go through an interview process. If you study/train and get through the interview, then you get the job and all it's benefits. This way, employees can focus on doing the right things for the company and if they feel they're ready for the next level, apply for it. If they don't get it, its based on merit - they can go back, get more experience/study etc. and reapply later. Their ego isn't destroyed, they're not pushed to to do the wrong things simply to get promoted, and I bet most people will remain at the company.
  • bostik 4y ago
    I think promotions to the next level should just be considered a new job (in the same company), and you don't 'win it' or get promoted - instead you apply for it and go through an interview process. That sounds like a recipe for an incredibly toxic environment. Not only are you hired for a specific pigeonhole, you are expressly forbidden from progressing through it: at least in some sane companies promotion is preceded by already having done the new role for a time and the title jump merely formalises the situation. In fact, I thought the pigeonhole hiring in traditional finance was bad enough. You just managed to outdo decades of dysfunction in one try. The last thing we need in tech is a codified caste system.
    • grog454 4y ago
      The other posts in this thread make it sound like internal promotion has higher barriers than an external apply/interview/offer process. Bizarre when you think about it, but it does seem to be the norm. The person you're replying to is suggesting that employees should be encouraged to apply to other positions within their current company as if they were an external hire. I've worked at a company that did both (internal promotion and internal re-hire) and IME people that actively applied to new positions had faster "career progression".
• sytelus 4y ago
  I wonder if any company has successfully eliminated promo-culture. One possible option (in tech context) is to have same base for everyone (like Amazon used to have) with a $0 to $1billion stock range for everyone. Then you select actual stock amount in proportion to increased customer satisfaction, product impact and adoption. No promos ever. All the mess of titles "Staff", "Principal" etc are gone too. No one talks down to anyone exercising their titles. What would be problem with such a system?
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    A lot of work is hard to evaluate in terms of those metrics. Especially comparing people across different areas of the stack. Also it encourages a cutthroat competitive culture of stealing credit. At least with levels higher level people don’t need to steal credit from lower level people and aren’t directly evaluated against them.
• suketk 4y ago
  A fantastic blog post that dives into the same problem: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google It inspired me to quit years later and write my own version: https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google
• bern4444 4y ago
  I've begun developing a philosophy under the idea that I have less interest in touting my accomplishments and successes in the aim of getting a promotion and instead expect my lead/manager to notice and actively reward that either through promos, raise, new equity grant etc. If a company, or speaking more locally, my manager doesn't do that, I'd rather just leave and try somewhere else. Some may view this as childish, picking up and leaving just cause I don't get what I want. I view it as exercising my market power and refusing to be pigeon holed into a system that exists just because that's the way it's always been. This philosophy certainly benefits from the current job market and this makes me feel more empowered knowing I can just pick up and leave and get a better raise, promotion, new equity round etc. A good signal for identifying these types of companies where this approach can work IMO is - Smaller companies - Ask and look into engineers seeing if there are lots of internal promotions - Learn what the promotion process is at a company before joining.
• mattpratt 4y ago
  A problem I've noticed working at larger companies is complexity simply for the sake of demonstrating complexity. In order to demonstrate technical prowess or importance, engineers will push a project in terms of headcount, solution, etc. Good engineering can look simple. The best engineers I've worked with will make things look easy. This can be at odds with promo driven culture.
• blobbers 4y ago
  YES! I worked at a start-up that was later acquired by a mega corp. When it was a start-up, it felt like we were focused on growing the pie. Once we were acquired, everyone just wanted a bigger slice for themselves. I also felt like we had a ton of terrible presentations, and it felt like a braggy culture whereby you had to promote the work you did and make it seem more important. The reality was we all knew who the good engineers were and who the bad ones were. It was just annoying to have to listen to people talk about a widget they'd built that tbh nobody really cared about. I worked with people to make their talks less about promotion and more about education; that at least made the presentations bearable and engineers felt like they might have learned something from them. Eventually though I realized I didn't want to be in that sort of culture and joined a smaller company.
  • stonecharioteer 4y ago
    Yes. I worked at a big fintech company and all people cared about was marketting what they were doing and never solving the actual problem. Everyone knew who the bad developers and bad leaders were. No one did anything about it. At the end, my friends and I left because we were fed up
• oneepic 4y ago
  Thoughts on the following idea? I think Google's incentives have a problem similar to the incentives of any other company: It's open-ended, and possible to game everything. Whether promotions are based on the "hard problems" solved by your work, or the revenue it generates for the company -- or hell, even the software quality/performance -- this will always cause drama, people will get mad and leave. Any choice will lead to some positives and negatives for the whole company. You might hate Google's choice, maybe enough to leave, but you might end up joining Microsoft/MANA and hate their incentives too. Basically, you're back to square one.
  • astrange 4y ago
    I propose changing the promotion criteria every year so they can't be predicted.
• JJMcJ 4y ago
  Is Google an up or out company? That is, if you don't get a promotion in a certain number of years, you will be encouraged to leave? That would encourage making projects more complex than they need to be, to get that promotion.
  • aix1 4y ago
    For software engineers, the expectation is to get to L4 eventually (new grads get hired at L3). I've not seen any concrete guidance on what "eventually" means in this context. This used to be L5 until a few years back.
    • JJMcJ 4y ago
      So if they make one promotion, they are OK indefinitely?
      • aix1 4y ago
        They have to continue meeting the requirements of their level (in this case L4) but there's no expectation of growth beyond that level. Even the old system, where there was a formal expectation for every SWE to grow to L5, wasn't uniformly enforced. One person I know joined as an L4 SWE twelve or so years ago; they're still an L4 SWE.
• titzer 4y ago
  I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager. Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain: Everyone needs to chill the f### out. The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too high. It's off the charts how obsessed seemingly everyone is about it. It's off the charts how much company time was blown on it and psychological stress people were subjected to. IMHO, the process at Google doesn't need to be readjusted or tinkered with, but somehow de-escalated; like it needs to not be such a huge f'ing deal. One positive development ~5 years ago is that promotion to levels L5 and below were mostly moved out of the IC's hands and into their manager's. Despite being a manager at the time (and creating more work for me), I thought this was great. It reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their own packets, which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-promoters less. It got employees thinking less about promotion, since there was less they could control or do. There were other biases that crept up, but it helps the psychology of day-to-day life to not be stressing over the frantic ladder climb.
  • openfuture 4y ago
    Inevitable with bureaucracy unless we solve the oracle problem in a tragedy of the commons resistant way.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • lostcolony 4y ago
    Can't speak to Google, but I can say that having ICs write their own packets has been hugely enabling for me at other companies. It means their success isn't reliant solely on implicit visibility of their work by me (which in turn meant I either had to maintain visibility on everything to the nth degree, get everyone to give constant feedback on each other, or fail to recognize their successes). I still come in and help consolidate and tweak it (I ask for a brag sheet from them that fits the packet format), with a 1-on-1 or three to ensure any questions I have get answered, and that we're aligned on the message, but taking it off my plate was -huge-.
• dvirsky 4y ago
  One thing that could make this less problematic - make levels hidden. Another more radical approach - get rid of levels completely. Increase pay significantly, similar to a promo if someone is doing good consistently, don't if they're just okay, fire them if they suck, but make levels implicit.
• javier_e06 4y ago
  Those who stayed later Fridays and logged in to work on the weekends, those who rattled some cages and when yelled, yelled back, where promoted. The rest of us who enjoy our evenings with our families and married feasibility with sustainability got burned out and left for greener pastures. Good article.
• ridiculous_fish 4y ago
  The Netflix model is worth considering as an antidote. In short: 1. Don't hire junior engineers. 2. All ICs have the same title: Senior ____ Engineer.
  • charlespierce 4y ago
    Even Netflix is moving to have levels, however. At great cost to morale it seems, with people who were formerly all at the same title being grouped into potentially different levels.
• tdiff 4y ago
  Can it be that the aim of this system is limiting the number of potential promotees, similar to how leetcoding limits number of candidates for hiring?
• goatcode 4y ago
  I clicked the link ready to read and then feel critical about a criticism of meritocracy, but found the exact opposite. This makes me realize that promotion in the current state of tech and likely other types of businesses is pretty far removed from merit. Great article, and it's sad that business has made it necessary to point out that doing a good job and being awesome are the most important parts of promoting employees. There's a lot of fat to be trimmed in organizational structures, I would hypothesize.
• MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Could be worse. You could be on a small team where there's no room for promotion and then get a 3% yearly raise based on your production despite the fact that you were rated "excellent" across the board because company policy dictates that 4/5 and 5/5 ratings are specifically for people they intend to promote, and alas your team isn't large enough for there to be promotions.... so you have to deal with your manager saying "I wanted to give you a 5, but I was only allowed to give you a 3 due to company policy."
  • JJMcJ 4y ago
    Then there are ultra-micro companies where there can never be a promotion, only a raise, because the team is one or two people. Then it's likely 3% forever.
• nharada 4y ago
  > Post-hoc design documents written specifically to explain work to a promo-committee after the feature has been built I actually wish these would get written all the time. Not because of a promo-committee, but because post-hoc documentation explaining how the system works after it's already been built (as opposed to a design doc from the planning stages that may or may not reflect the actual state of the built system) is really valuable.
  • erik_seaberg 4y ago
    My dad used to go aboard a ship, take measurements, and draw what they call an as-built blueprint for this reason. He’d find crazy stuff like “they must have moved this wall a little because the equipment wouldn’t have fit in the space on the plan.”
• ChrisCinelli 4y ago
  Some HR rules are put in place to make the workplace appear more "equal" but it often ends up making advance people that are good a paper-pushing and BSing. After enough years are passed with this system in place, the company is full with people that rarely care much about the users and care a lot about their status and paycheck. In these kind of cultures what tend to flourish is ego-boosting shining objects that rarely impact the users for good.
• ChrisCinelli 4y ago
  I was talking last week with a friend working for Google and worked at Facebook before. The overhead to show that you are worthy for promotion is ridiculous. But he was giving for granted that was part of the "game." I was never interested in climbing the corporate ladder and prefer to impact the users but I found that unfortunately trying to avoid wasting time in this overhead is eventually working again the users because who prefer spending time improving the product does not get promoted.
• ozzythecat 4y ago
  > The main problem with promotion-oriented culture is that it’s very hard to align promotion-criteria with business objectives, and so engineers end up doing a lot of work that doesn’t necessarily most benefit the product, users, or business – or even potentially their own growth. Welcome to Amazon! Just about everything in this article rings true at Amazon. In fact, I’d say Amazon is even worse. I think L4 to L5 and L5 to L6 promotions have certainly gotten easier over the years, and promotions have actively been used as a retention tool, given all the other (dis)incentives that would convince talent to leave. What I saw in Amazon retail and Alexa was a culture of: 1) refusing to work on valuable projects unless you could actively claim to be the lead 2) taking credit for others’ contributions, or deliberately throwing a teammate under the bus and saying X didn’t work because of some thing specific they proposed (even if you agreed with it at the time) 3) general culture of back stabbing and not helping your own teammates, especially out of concern that your teammate would reap the promo benefit over you And at a higher level, L7 managers will attribute a failed project, mismanaged project, or other issues to a partner team. “Our team is blocked on this other team Y” - never mind the fact that all the contracts have been agreed upon and this L7s team never wrote a line of code. By the time I left, Amazon had gotten horrendous with organizations trying to invent “frameworks” so A or B can be done in 1 click, and this became the way for Sr SDEs and Principals to get their promotion. They create complexity and deliver some half baked, constrained way of solving problem X. This lets you show “impact” across an entire organization, even if this new abstraction has made engineers’ lives a living hell. This was a major reason I left Amazon. The company was running out of ideas, and instead of focusing on products and customers, the engineering culture was heavily focused on inventing complexity for the sake of promotion. 9 times out of 10, the son of a bitch creating this complexity would take his or her promo and then move to another org, a new greenfield project. Never sticking around to deal with the pain they’ve caused.
• rpowers 4y ago
  Ex-googler here. I hated the promotion process with a passion. 20 pages of "evidence" which is usually just links to green/blue docs, CLs, and just flowery puff language to argue your case. My org skipped the promo committee process at the start of the pandemic when I was up for it. When we had teammate that changed teams join us for a virtual meet up to tell us _he_ got promo in his org. I quit the next week.
• cjsplat 4y ago
  Based on my Google manger time and prior experience, the problem isn't necessarily the promo orientation - it was the emphasis on tech heroics to justify the promotion. Rumor I heard was that pre-IPO the only was to get a stock option/grant boost was to be prompted. I believe the first actual annual refresh was in '06. For several years after that it was 100% managed at the SVP level, so you needed to be known at the top of your management chain to get a refresh beyond the algorithmic minimum. Also there was top level compression because Google didn't have L8, 9, or 10s for a long time - if Jeff Dean is a L8, a new hire previous "Director level" engineer lands at 7 if they are lucky. Given that Google frequently hired at one or two job grades below typical Si Valley, promo was a MAJOR motivator, and you needed to seem as though you fit in at the next level up. Google's approach to the Peter Principle was that if you got promoted and then didn't meet expectations, they would manage you out. The question was always "Is that project really L6, L7, L8, L9 work?" I saw someone who changed the way a longstanding internet protocol was seen and replaced it based on their research stuck in the "only L6 level work" category. And of course the promo committees were filled with people who got promoted under these regimes. Corporate culture gets set and maintained in strange and interesting ways.
• omoikane 4y ago
  > you’re likely focused on one career question: when am I going to make it to the next level? This premise does not apply to everyone, there are many people who are perfectly happy with their current income and their current set of responsibilities. It's indeed likely that most people do their work for the money, and promotions do contribute directly to that incentive. But there is a sizable population who are not in it for the money, and they contribute to the company culture as well. Related, this article reminds me of comments on an earlier article: "Do Not Change Your Job": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30437733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30437733
• dqpb 4y ago
  The main problem is that promo-culture is fake meritocracy. Real meritocracy is a market economy (barring corruption).
• nomoreusernames 4y ago
  google knows how to overengineer thing.
• tomatowurst 4y ago
  I feel such a disconnect from all the comments. Seems most engineers/manager in the comments are pulling by my estimates, $400,000~$1,000,000+ a year arguing over culture. I don't get it because it's not an issue outside of FANG. Seen far more ugly stuff in companies that pay 90% of that in Canada. It explains why there's a big brain drain here.
  • activitypea 4y ago
    I don't understand this comment. Are you saying people should take their money and stop complaining?
    • tomatowurst 4y ago
      Seems you understood it just fine.
• cracrecry 4y ago
  So what this man is saying is: "We at Google are promoting the wrong things. We have necessary work that our code monkeys do but nobody wants to do because those jobs are not promoted" As a manager of a company promoting the right things is your job. Of course people want to earn half a million dollars if they can.
• carl_sandland 4y ago
  This is a fascinating, complex topic. Why are a group of very clever, smart people spending ANY energy on giving each other high-school level report cards? Why does one of our best ever tech companies become focused on everything but the customer ? I'd like to think they are dumb but c'mon, they are not dumb people. It doesn't mean I can't feel sad and deeply upset at this is what it takes to 'succeed' at a company I have honest admiration for. BUT; I've been researching this 'problem'; which boils down to "is a hierarchical management structure needed" for a group of 'activists' to achieve great things? So far I have found no alternatives, why do we have to keep track of our 'success' and relative worth so intensely so share the pie around? as the top responses says; everyone needs to chill out and I'd add "try to be nice and do no harm". The only point I have to add is that as someone who wants to not participate and does not care what "level" they rank; f### off?
  • ryan93 4y ago
    You would turn down an extra few hundred K a year to avoid some paperwork? Lol
• WYepQ4dNnG 4y ago
  In my experience, most engineers won't even get the chance to work on something so impactful and cross team/org to land a promotion. Not their fault. Sometime, as everything in life, you are in the right place at the right time. You get to work on a good project and bingo. But most of the time you will end up fixing bugs in some half baked, broken PoC that someone launched in production just to get that promotion, and now you got to make it to work, while the person who got promoted get to move on and draft another broken PoC, launch it etc ... It depends if you are the one fixing shit and make things work (you rarely will get a promotion) or you are the lucky one who get to write spaghetti code on the next thing, cash out and move on onto the next thing ... Life is not fair I know ...
• foota 4y ago
  :eyes:
• formercoder 4y ago
  FYI - Google completely revamped their promotion and rating system just today.
• Husafan 4y ago
  I've been at Google for 12 years, and this has not been my experience. While it is a popular narrative, it is by no means dominant, and is fairly specific to individual teams. I got my second promotion leading the Google Maps Desktop Latency team. We demonstrated impact solely by reducing load latency and increasing performance while advocating for latency consciousness across the product space and implementing latency regression tests and monitoring. Google has some of the most complex infrastructure in existence, and there are thousands of engineers that are getting promoted and finding gratification in maintaining and improving this infrastructure. My experience at Google has been characterized by collaborating with the smartest and most driven people I've ever worked with. And I worked at several companies before Google. I think a side-effect of this personality type is that the engineers themselves want to make a difference, whether through maintaining Google's complex infrastructure or launching new products. And while it may be easier to show impact by launching a new product, it is by no means a problem unique to Google. Startups find it much easier to show impact by launching and buying users, rather than measuring how useful the product actually is. I have come to believe that, lean-startup style, a good engineer should be able to demonstrate how the work they are doing is important to a company, a product or a product's users. With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually is valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.
  • deviation 4y ago
    I'm going through the Google interview process right now, second round. My interviewer has rescheduled three times in the past week, each with less than 24hrs notice and without a reason given. Is there a 'safe' space I can give feedback regarding this that doesn't damage my chances of making it through the process?
    • Husafan 4y ago
      During my interview process, my recruiter was very much my advocate. Have you talked to them honestly about this? It should not hurt you. I'm sorry you're going through this.
    • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
• pgeertsema 4y ago
  "If you have other ideas on how to avoid the slip into promo-culture, I’d love to hear your thoughts" Proper bonuses (proper = multiple of base salary). If promotion is the only way to get comp then obviously it matters a great deal. However, if you can get good comp based on your performance (and not your rank), then promotion matter much less. At most investment banks/hedge funds the highest paid employee is NOT the CEO; it is somebody that made the the firm $248m last year and that got to keep a fraction of it as a bonus.
• sharadov 4y ago
  It is an eternal quandary - make money and promotions not the central theme of your life. Move jobs, when it becomes a soul-sucking promotion oriented culture. I chose this path - am probably poorer than FAANG folk, but I did not trade my soul and find joy in the work that I do.
• thumbsup-_- 4y ago
  The fact that this comment thread is so long itself tells how big a problem this is.
• chmike 4y ago
  It seam that the fix should be the promotion criteria and process. - use continuous promotion screening instead of well defined annual periods - use indirect measurement instead of candidate self selling (involve manager's and colleague's feedback, but not only because introverted people merit promotions too) - measure things to be aligned with the success of the project and the company objectives - increase impression of progress and success by increasing the number of promotions (gamification) - reduce frustration and demoralizing effect by reducing the gains of promotions - make the criteria clear and objective to reduce frustration and demoralization (clear goals, clear push directions) It seam that a system based on points (or karma) might be interesting to explore. People would earn these points by different actions or indirect objective evaluations. People may loose points if efficiency or contribution quality degrades, but smooth out to absorb "life accidents" (e.g. transient health or personal social issues), to give a second chance, etc. That's what I would explore. It's not easy to align this promotion system with the benefits of the company. Not every company earn billions like google.
• thn-gap 4y ago
  I've seen one case at Google where a Manager was going for promotion, in part based on some metrics claiming the product usage increased a lot. Someone found that the metric was broken and was overcounting, but the report chain was explicitly told NOT to fix the bug until the manager gets promoted. This was kept broken for months. He did get promoted to L7 (senior staff), since the metrics were very positive, even though it was not deserved and the product was worsened in the process. Make a huge incentive of promotion, behind well defined rules, and smart competitive engineers will tlgame the system. Even if it's an actual negative value for the product and company. You can always change teams after promo and start fresh with your increased total compensation.
  • native_samples 4y ago
    Eh I saw worse than that. The last team I was on at Google before I left had metrics that for years genuinely got better, and these were real metrics users cared about, they weren't gamed or irrelevant (related to spam detection). Each quarter our manager would go to his managers and present the team's latest success. He'd show the metrics and say how they'd improved from last time. Praise would come down from on high. As time went by this little ritual become almost formalized, because said manager kept re-using the same presentation slides each time, just adjusting the numbers. And the praise was always the same. Morale was good. One day, the metrics stopped going up. In fact they went down a bit. What happened? The manager went to his manager and gave the exact same presentation, in which somehow the metrics were still great news and the team was still executing really well. And his managers didn't notice. The praise came back, just the same as it always did. At that point me and one or two others on the team became very cynical and lost motivation, because we realized that nobody who influenced our careers seemed to have noticed what was really happening. Celebrating an endless series of utopian success stories, regardless of truth, was more important than tackling reality.
• gverrilla 4y ago
  never gonna join the mice race
• geekraver 4y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I took a level cut when I went to Google from Microsoft after being assured by the recruiter that, as a tech lead, getting promoted would be easy. Unfortunately due to two teams using the same code names I was put in Ads, last place I wanted to be, and took a non-lead role in another team instead. It quickly became apparent that the game at Google was very dysfunctional, and the “manager-bias” problem they were trying to avoid, while sometimes a real problem, was still a much better system that Google had cooked up. I lost interest in trying to get promoted and tried to focus on interesting work for the next four years. Meanwhile, I saw crappy engineers around me get promoted (and sometimes immediately use their new level to jump to Facebook) while hard-working engineers who cared about glue work, quality and meeting customer needs get overlooked (and sometimes leave too in frustration). Combined with having line managers with 16-25 reports (rendering them effectively useless), it was a pretty broken culture. (This was 6-10 years ago; I know some things have changed, but I hear from people there it’s still crazy).
• specialist 4y ago
  > Alternatives to promo-cultures What would a co-op look like? aka Worker Self-Directed Enterprise. https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace Could a co-op technology startup raise capital? I have zero clue about such things. My guess is that VCs want to control the board and exec roles, so wouldn't fund an efforts where they can't replace the leaders. What about the co-ops and FOSS? I've been casually poking around, trying to see how misc projects are organized, governed. eg ZeroMQ, SQLite, Zig. What about the maturity of an industry? Sure, emerging markets and hyper growth are probably hostile to co-ops. BDFL vs democracy. But search is now mature. Take away the advertising biz model and it's just a bog standard IT project. Surely something like DDG could be a co-op.