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> 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

> 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.
- thewarrior 4y ago
  It’s basically cargo cult engineering. There’s the appearance of engineering and sophistication but the actual substance is hollow.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Yep. The truth is, most of the work we do isn't that important, interesting, or useful, so the pomp and circumstance is necessary to raise its "visibility." Truly sad.
- icedchai 4y ago
  You described many of reasons I left a previous company. As one of the higher level engineers, I was constantly writing "tech specs", reviewing tech specs, doing code reviews (one week I had 12), and forced to present slide decks full of fluff against my will. Usually I'd push the slide shows off for a few weeks, but eventually I'd run out of excuses. Occasionally, I'd get to do some real work, but it mostly involved refactoring an almost decade old smoldering dumpster fire, so I left.
- thethethethe 4y ago
  > 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. This is absolutely my experience at Google. If you want to move up quickly you have to write docs to convince people to work on your ideas. > 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. This doesn't really align with my experience. Most people I interact with at Google do not try to do this. They are happy being ICs at L4 or L5 doing their own thing. There is plenty of room to be an L5 or even L6 IC without constantly self promoting, it will just take you much longer to get there and you will never move past L6.

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.

thewarrior 4y ago
It’s basically cargo cult engineering. There’s the appearance of engineering and sophistication but the actual substance is hollow.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Yep. The truth is, most of the work we do isn't that important, interesting, or useful, so the pomp and circumstance is necessary to raise its "visibility." Truly sad.
icedchai 4y ago
You described many of reasons I left a previous company. As one of the higher level engineers, I was constantly writing "tech specs", reviewing tech specs, doing code reviews (one week I had 12), and forced to present slide decks full of fluff against my will. Usually I'd push the slide shows off for a few weeks, but eventually I'd run out of excuses. Occasionally, I'd get to do some real work, but it mostly involved refactoring an almost decade old smoldering dumpster fire, so I left.
thethethethe 4y ago
> 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. This is absolutely my experience at Google. If you want to move up quickly you have to write docs to convince people to work on your ideas. > 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. This doesn't really align with my experience. Most people I interact with at Google do not try to do this. They are happy being ICs at L4 or L5 doing their own thing. There is plenty of room to be an L5 or even L6 IC without constantly self promoting, it will just take you much longer to get there and you will never move past L6.