4 ms·

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/exe

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?
- rileyphone 4y ago
  Maybe just don't go above that. Whatsapp was at that level when acquired fwiw.
fishtoaster 4y ago
This echoes my read of this article as well. Any system for promotion has tradeoffs. You can't just say "this system's tradeoffs suck, we should have a new system with no tradeoffs." I'll admit, I don't really have a good solution. My strategy has been to just stick to early-stage startups where everyone is aligned on company success. Would love to hear some more meaningful discussion of alternative systems for managing career ladders.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  Experience points. Every you complete a task, you gain experience points. Gain enough, you go up a level. Flavor them for different job tracks, tweak the rewards to incentivize the behaviors you want and not the ones you don't. If someone isn't gaining experience at a good rate, take a closer look to see whether they are doing things that should be worth XP, or whether you need to have a different conversation. Give people some choices on leveling up -- maybe most people just want a bump to salary, maybe other people would like to gain more vacation, stock, half days Friday, a private office, a good parking spot, etc etc.
sytelus 4y ago
The deeper issue you are pointing out is that only early employees get to capture the majority of the value while late employees only get the bread-crumbs. So everyone wants to be "early employee" of new products. In a way, this is inherent problem with capitalism where the idea is that if you have the capital, you pay the workers generating your capital only through return on capital as opposed to part of the capital. This way you can grow your networth exponentially in capitalistic system as long as you can begin with sufficient initial capital somehow. Anyone without such capital must live on month-to-month or year-to-year wages generated by the return-on-capital.
pillowkusis 4y ago
> The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others. This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager. Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.
- analyst74 4y ago
  I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of their turf, and Google. The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence. These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports. Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I've been on promotion committees where it was clear that the manager didn't support it, but we promoted the candidate. I feel like most of the memorable discussions in those committees were figuring out how to give the manager feedback on how bad of a job they were doing. I agree that you're basically screwed, especially L3->L4, if your manager isn't actively counselling you on how to grow your career. You obviously don't have enough experience to do it on your own at that point, so you are at their whim. Even when you do have the experience, if you don't have a good working relationship with your manager, you're in trouble anywhere. It is ultimately going to be them or you, and you are easier to get rid of ("he took another offer" versus "everyone thinks your manager is a jerk, so we fired him, oh by the way in the meantime your career is on hold while we figure out what the fuck to do please keep showing up").
malfist 4y ago
Yeah, I agree with you totally. The promo culture is certainly broken, but the solution they propose seems....like startup worship at best, exploitation at worst (work harder without a payout and be happy). I don't know what the solution is. I've been at amazon, and the number of abandoned promo projects are insane. Microsoft has like 7 billion levels, maybe they have it right, you can promo someone without it meaning a whole lot, but it still gives them greater pay and a sense of progression.
klabb3 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. Totally agreed. One thing that killed my motivation in mega-corp(tm) is that your peers are, in reality, your competitors, despite the constant barrage of HR propaganda indoctrinating the opposite. Either directly or indirectly, you are incentivized to take high visibility projects for yourself, take credit for other people's work, and reinforce a narrative about yourself where you are better precisely than those around you.

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?
rileyphone 4y ago
Maybe just don't go above that. Whatsapp was at that level when acquired fwiw.

fishtoaster 4y ago

This echoes my read of this article as well. Any system for promotion has tradeoffs. You can't just say "this system's tradeoffs suck, we should have a new system with no tradeoffs." I'll admit, I don't really have a good solution. My strategy has been to just stick to early-stage startups where everyone is aligned on company success. Would love to hear some more meaningful discussion of alternative systems for managing career ladders.

saalweachter 4y ago
Experience points. Every you complete a task, you gain experience points. Gain enough, you go up a level. Flavor them for different job tracks, tweak the rewards to incentivize the behaviors you want and not the ones you don't. If someone isn't gaining experience at a good rate, take a closer look to see whether they are doing things that should be worth XP, or whether you need to have a different conversation. Give people some choices on leveling up -- maybe most people just want a bump to salary, maybe other people would like to gain more vacation, stock, half days Friday, a private office, a good parking spot, etc etc.

sytelus 4y ago

The deeper issue you are pointing out is that only early employees get to capture the majority of the value while late employees only get the bread-crumbs. So everyone wants to be "early employee" of new products. In a way, this is inherent problem with capitalism where the idea is that if you have the capital, you pay the workers generating your capital only through return on capital as opposed to part of the capital. This way you can grow your networth exponentially in capitalistic system as long as you can begin with sufficient initial capital somehow. Anyone without such capital must live on month-to-month or year-to-year wages generated by the return-on-capital.

pillowkusis 4y ago

> The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others. This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager. Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.

analyst74 4y ago
I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of their turf, and Google. The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence. These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports. Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.
jrockway 4y ago
I've been on promotion committees where it was clear that the manager didn't support it, but we promoted the candidate. I feel like most of the memorable discussions in those committees were figuring out how to give the manager feedback on how bad of a job they were doing. I agree that you're basically screwed, especially L3->L4, if your manager isn't actively counselling you on how to grow your career. You obviously don't have enough experience to do it on your own at that point, so you are at their whim. Even when you do have the experience, if you don't have a good working relationship with your manager, you're in trouble anywhere. It is ultimately going to be them or you, and you are easier to get rid of ("he took another offer" versus "everyone thinks your manager is a jerk, so we fired him, oh by the way in the meantime your career is on hold while we figure out what the fuck to do please keep showing up").

malfist 4y ago

Yeah, I agree with you totally. The promo culture is certainly broken, but the solution they propose seems....like startup worship at best, exploitation at worst (work harder without a payout and be happy). I don't know what the solution is. I've been at amazon, and the number of abandoned promo projects are insane. Microsoft has like 7 billion levels, maybe they have it right, you can promo someone without it meaning a whole lot, but it still gives them greater pay and a sense of progression.

klabb3 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. Totally agreed. One thing that killed my motivation in mega-corp(tm) is that your peers are, in reality, your competitors, despite the constant barrage of HR propaganda indoctrinating the opposite. Either directly or indirectly, you are incentivized to take high visibility projects for yourself, take credit for other people's work, and reinforce a narrative about yourself where you are better precisely than those around you.