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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 f

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)
oofbey 4y ago
Another example of this is their OKR system. If you meet all your quarterly goals at Google, that's not a success. In fact, you're frowned upon for not setting your goals high enough. Their whole management process encourages people to chase after impossible goals, and literally discourages people from getting things done.
- xmprt 4y ago
  Missing OKRs always seemed a little weird to me. It strikes me as a lack of vision and makes the numbers and goals chosen seem very arbitrary.
  - nine_zeros 4y ago
    Missing OKRs means that the team cannot set achievable goals. It is a signal that the team has terrible foresight. I know the argument is that by being more ambitious and achieving 70%, you are setting ambitious goals. But then the goals are never met. The work doesn't finish. The projects falter. The users are unhappy. Engineers leave.
    - xmprt 4y ago
      In my experience, people make 10 goals during planning and then later decide on the 7 that they're going to hit. I wouldn't mind if the goals were ambitious but efforts were made to achieve 70% of them. However, in practice it seems like there's no vision during planning and instead they change course midway through the half. What's the point of planning if you can't stick to the plan.
- jedberg 4y ago
  Yeah from what I've heard you ideally want to hit 70-80% of your OKRs, and people game it to make sure they fail at one or two so they don't get accused of being "too easy".
  - dekhn 4y ago
    One of the most hilarious things I've ever seen was the head of Google Plus loudly sharing his "1.0 OKR" regarding social adoption at TGIF. It was about that time folks got suspicious and some long-termers found out Vic was lying about adoption rates.
svachalek 4y ago
Yup. I left a decade ago with this exact thought. There are people there who lift mountains to create real working systems, but you're actively discouraged from doing that if you want any sort of career there. And spending two weeks a year on performance reviews just serves as a constant reminder of those values. It's easily visible from the outside too. The constant stream of one half-baked video chat solution or social network replacing the last one, without any sense of progress or continuity, why would a company do that? Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision.
- esprehn 4y ago
  > why would a company do that? Or maybe it's because the company is always looking for the runaway 10X success story (like search, ads, etc). Incremental growth doesn't make a dent in the balance sheet. So they're always shutting down the products that didn't explode into a success and starting new ones to roll the dice.
  - dogleash 4y ago
    I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent poster, you just re-framed it terms that gloss over the downsides.
- blobbers 4y ago
  "Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision." -- svachalek THIS IS A GREAT QUOTE! UPVOTE FOR REAL INSIGHT.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I work in academic libraries. At the point Google Books and Google Scholar (two things that were relevant to my work) were being developed or very new, maybe 10 years ago now, I could actually talk to Google engineers about questions on how I could/should best integrate on my end, or problems or bugs (I did find some, that the google contacts agreed were). (It's true that cooperation from libraries/academic sector was something Google needed to succeed there too, to some extent). Two years later... forget it. There was no way to get anyone's attention or a response about anything. This includes actual bugs and problems. It was pretty clear to me then that there was nobody driving the bus on these projects anymore. There had been excited invested smart people around for the development, but once the thing seemed stable... there didn't seem to be anyone around at all anymore? I started to notice that this was how things worked at Google generally -- after a new product was deployed, there seemed to be simply nobody around anymore with the time and interest to act on bug reports, or talk to external partners, or just care at all. Without having at that time heard anything from inside the walls, that became my theory of how things worked at Google -- everything is abandonware. So, yeah it's visible.
somethoughts 4y ago
At least in my own small company - I'm hoping to promote the concept of the T shaped technical leader ladder. You're rewarded/measured on two metrics - breadth and depth - a depth metric - leadership in your own specific project team where you add features. - a breadth metric - you've demonstrably shown that you've gotten other teams outside your own to contribute to your project effectively. Additionally and perhaps more importantly you must show that you can act in a supporting role on multiple other projects outside your own core project. Supporting other projects outside your core project include signing up for triage support, updating documentation, improving testing, etc. without frustrating the primary maintainers. IMHO - focusing on depth as the only way to technical career progression leads to feature creep, ball of mud codebases with high barriers to entry and silo thinking. Would be curious if/why this is controversial.
- sytelus 4y ago
  You should reward only based on customer satiesfaction and adoption.
  - somethoughts 4y ago
    Agree - one feature that is missed w.r.t. long term customer satisfaction and adoption is long term support for previously delivered features. This is exacerbated when product managers/SW teams are mostly measured on new feature delivery metrics. The full feature lifecycle and reducing bus-factor across the entire existing product feature set is rarely considered as its not generally captured in OKR metrics.
    - gkop 4y ago
      You could count the number of customer complaints. Oh wait, we’re talking about Google..
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I think both are important but it’s not necessary for any one person to excel at both. Some will naturally be better at depth and others at breadth. As long as you acknowledge both types of contributions I think it will work out well.
lisper 4y ago
Another former Googler here (from waaaaaaayyyy back -- I was employee #104). The reason Google is the way it is, and many organizations are the way they are, is that they are trying to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success. Google initially succeeded by solving what was at the time a Really Hard Problem, and so the people at the top want to reproduce that by encouraging people to solve more Really Hard Problems. Apple has fallen into the exact same trap. Their initial success came from building a Cool New Thing, and so they are constantly trying to build the next Cool New Thing. The problem is that at some point the product has actually converged to a local design maximum and so making further changes to it in order to produce something New and Cool is not actually an improvement. But it doesn't work because it's sn inductive fallacy. Just because solving a Really Hard Problem or making a Cool New Thing led to success once does not mean that doing these things will lead to success in general. But the memory of that initial success is really hard to get past, especially when it was as earth-shattering as the initial Google search engine, or the Mac or the iPhone. (Apple has actually done better than most companies at reproducing their initial success. They've done it at least five times, with the Apple II, the Mac, OSX, the iPod and the iPhone. But then there is the touch bar, the butterfly keyboard, the flat look...)
- brokencode 4y ago
  I think Apple has done a fantastic job of incremental improvements on their products rather than chasing the next cool thing. Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better? For instance, they often resist new technologies like high refresh rate or OLED screens, 5G, etc., until they feel the technology is developed sufficiently and won’t impact battery life. There are other brands that compete by making a list of features rather than a coherent product. Of the examples you named, both the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard are gone now, and the latest Macs are the best Macs ever. That shows a willingness to try new things, while also showing that they have good judgement in the long term and a willingness to move away from what doesn’t work. Also, the iPad and Apple Watch haven’t been as important to Apple as the iPhone, but they are still original and category-defining products that I would call innovative. Not every new product needs to double your company’s market cap to be a big success in the category.
mathattack 4y ago
What’s more import for Senior leaders to do - solve hard problems or useful ones? If it’s the former they’re doing the right thing. If it’s the latter that explains a lot of their deprecation issues.
joshuamorton 4y ago
So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the same system for years? When do you stop promoting them? There's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine. Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, does he get promoted again? Once? Twice? Does he become a principal engineer, for adequately maintaining his corner of the world? The person who is really good and really effective at fixing user issues, first of all can't scale past a certain point, but second of all, likely doesn't have the the experience to design and shepherd the data storage system that also manages permissions across nested groups efficiently (one of these is what we'd expect of a solid L4, the other is https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/). You're asking for title inflation. Is that really what you want? What you really want is a different role, "maintenance eng" who can get paid more for doing the same work they were doing yesterday, and who needs to reinterview for SWE roles, because its very quickly obvious that a principal maintenance eng and a principal eng do very different things!
- sytelus 4y ago
  If a person is locked up in one feature/one product and unwilling to learn new things for the years then I do not think that person should be promoted. You can certainly give merit increases to keep up with inflation but that's about that. Ultimately, we all responding to market value of a person. That value remains unchanged for someone not learning anything new for years after the earned experience saturates. In many professions like doctors or pilots, experience never saturates and continues to increase person's market value however in other like cashier or barista that's not the case. So this opinion is job-dependent.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    But the person might have the knowledge to build on whatever the system is, without having the mandate to do so. He'd still be the best person to modify the system, but for whatever reason the business doesn't need the edits. Should you keep him happy just in case or let him find another job and take the option to upgrade with him?
summerlight 4y ago
> the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. This is the real problem, but people typically underestimate difficulty of correctly identifying "useful" problems at scale. Fixing a bug is nice, but correctly prioritizing bugs worth fixing is harder than said because most cases relevant engineers have limited contexts on UX and PM also has limited contexts on its difficulty. I don't deny that big techs have a bias toward solving "interesting" problems, but in many cases seemingly simple bugs are not that really easy to solve while not making any dent on business.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  > but in many cases seemingly simple bugs are not that really easy to solve while not making any dent on business I work at a big tech company and see this all the time. Bugs that clearly exist and are impacting users, but they're hard to solve and have no or very little business impact. It doesn't really make sense to work on them, but it's kind of sad they just get left :/.
hintymad 4y ago
Isn't this problem shared by pretty much every large company? Why is Google particularly bad?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  I think Google has this worse than most because it has a relatively selective hiring process, large headcount, and is a mature company. The ratio of talent per scope is high, which mean there are less real problems left to solve per engineer.
lliamander 4y ago
> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. Playing the devil's advocate here, but shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors. The incentive problem to align people with the needs of the users is difficult. I imagine the best way to handle that would be through bonuses/profit sharing for high impact work, whereas promotions focus on difficulty of work.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Having technical expertise doesn’t mean much of anything if it doesn’t positively impact the bottom line.
  - lliamander 4y ago
    If it doesn't impact the bottom line then business folks need to do a better job of capturing the value you could provide.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams. It even came out during the Oracle trial that Google only made about $26 billion in profit from the inception of Android to 2016. Apple makes more from Google in mobile by being paid for it to be the default search engine ($12-$18 billion a year) than Google makes from Android.
      - lliamander 4y ago
        > Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams. Is that true of other ad-tech driven companies as well? Companies like Meta and Twitter. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are used to charging users directly for some good or service. It may be that they are just better positioned to establish those other revenue streams.
autokad 4y ago
Tech Management wants to -not- promote people, so they try to make promotion difficult which inadvertently creates promotion driven culture. For instance, if they promoted people for working hard, then everyone would work hard and we (high level management at tech companies) cant just promote everyone. so they make it arbitrarily hard, such as at Google "only promote people who solve hard problems". I think most tech companies will have some flavor of that, like at Amazon "work on projects that have cross team company impact". Its all about trying to -not- promote people fokes, which ironically creates this promotion driven culture. After all, we are mostly college grads, and a lot of us are from the top schools (not even the majority, just a lot).
titzer 4y ago
> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured. I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people introduce bullshit measures and game them. It's pretty much impossible to measure long term impact, but nevertheless, impact[1] was one of the main three drivers. [1] Leadership, difficulty, impact are the three main components of a succesful packet, especially at L6 and above.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured. Being "data focused" is probably a Good Thing in a very general sense, but there are real dangers that come with that. For example, there's a form of "data myopia" you can develop, which is best expressed by the old saw "data and optimization can help you get better at doing $SOMETHING, but don't tell you if you're doing the right $SOMETHING in the first place." I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people introduce bullshit measures and game them. And of course there's Goodhart's Law[1] which leads to situations where trying to be "data driven" actually makes things worse when people start trying to "game" the metrics. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
usrn 4y ago
It's much more boring and you don't hear much about it but it's ultimately more pleasant to run things this way.
bigcat123 4y ago
BurningFrog 4y ago
And this can and will go on until the $$ Billions from search/ads stop raining from the sky.
TuringNYC 4y ago
>> 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. Not saying this is the best thing, but it can get much, much worse at other places. I started my career at Accenture (then, Andersen Consulting). People go promoted for either sales (SrManagers or higher) or controlling issues (Managers and below.) Note, the aim was to control issues (documenting, writing up mitigation plans, briefing clients, deploying fixes, etc.) -- THE AIM WAS NOT TO PREVENT ISSUES. So code quality didnt get you promoted. Several years in, a group of individuals passed up for promotion realized this all-together and literally started turning a blind eye to minor bugs, which eventually passed into PROD. Then they would solve them (which is what Management wanted.) Shockingly they got kudos for controlling issues. Many got promoted. Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors.
- samhw 4y ago
  > Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors. I don't mean this as a slight at your comment - rather at the shockingness of the reality that your comment (really) needed to be said - but isn't this blatantly implied by the meaning of the word 'incentive'?? I'm astonished that people keep not realising this. The whole culture of OKRs/KPIs at startups feels like it's tempting this problem - I don't see why any but a very small number of companies should need to optimise metrics which are non-obvious. Having an OKR/KPI which one needs to deliberately decide on feels like a very pungent 'bad smell' of an XY problem.
dane-pgp 4y ago
> the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" So you're saying that the incentives misalignment at Google leads to engineers who aren't self-deprecating, and products which are self-deprecating?

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)

oofbey 4y ago

Another example of this is their OKR system. If you meet all your quarterly goals at Google, that's not a success. In fact, you're frowned upon for not setting your goals high enough. Their whole management process encourages people to chase after impossible goals, and literally discourages people from getting things done.

xmprt 4y ago
Missing OKRs always seemed a little weird to me. It strikes me as a lack of vision and makes the numbers and goals chosen seem very arbitrary.
- nine_zeros 4y ago
  Missing OKRs means that the team cannot set achievable goals. It is a signal that the team has terrible foresight. I know the argument is that by being more ambitious and achieving 70%, you are setting ambitious goals. But then the goals are never met. The work doesn't finish. The projects falter. The users are unhappy. Engineers leave.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    In my experience, people make 10 goals during planning and then later decide on the 7 that they're going to hit. I wouldn't mind if the goals were ambitious but efforts were made to achieve 70% of them. However, in practice it seems like there's no vision during planning and instead they change course midway through the half. What's the point of planning if you can't stick to the plan.
jedberg 4y ago
Yeah from what I've heard you ideally want to hit 70-80% of your OKRs, and people game it to make sure they fail at one or two so they don't get accused of being "too easy".
- dekhn 4y ago
  One of the most hilarious things I've ever seen was the head of Google Plus loudly sharing his "1.0 OKR" regarding social adoption at TGIF. It was about that time folks got suspicious and some long-termers found out Vic was lying about adoption rates.

svachalek 4y ago

Yup. I left a decade ago with this exact thought. There are people there who lift mountains to create real working systems, but you're actively discouraged from doing that if you want any sort of career there. And spending two weeks a year on performance reviews just serves as a constant reminder of those values. It's easily visible from the outside too. The constant stream of one half-baked video chat solution or social network replacing the last one, without any sense of progress or continuity, why would a company do that? Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision.

esprehn 4y ago
> why would a company do that? Or maybe it's because the company is always looking for the runaway 10X success story (like search, ads, etc). Incremental growth doesn't make a dent in the balance sheet. So they're always shutting down the products that didn't explode into a success and starting new ones to roll the dice.
- dogleash 4y ago
  I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent poster, you just re-framed it terms that gloss over the downsides.
blobbers 4y ago
"Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision." -- svachalek THIS IS A GREAT QUOTE! UPVOTE FOR REAL INSIGHT.
jrochkind1 4y ago
I work in academic libraries. At the point Google Books and Google Scholar (two things that were relevant to my work) were being developed or very new, maybe 10 years ago now, I could actually talk to Google engineers about questions on how I could/should best integrate on my end, or problems or bugs (I did find some, that the google contacts agreed were). (It's true that cooperation from libraries/academic sector was something Google needed to succeed there too, to some extent). Two years later... forget it. There was no way to get anyone's attention or a response about anything. This includes actual bugs and problems. It was pretty clear to me then that there was nobody driving the bus on these projects anymore. There had been excited invested smart people around for the development, but once the thing seemed stable... there didn't seem to be anyone around at all anymore? I started to notice that this was how things worked at Google generally -- after a new product was deployed, there seemed to be simply nobody around anymore with the time and interest to act on bug reports, or talk to external partners, or just care at all. Without having at that time heard anything from inside the walls, that became my theory of how things worked at Google -- everything is abandonware. So, yeah it's visible.

somethoughts 4y ago

At least in my own small company - I'm hoping to promote the concept of the T shaped technical leader ladder. You're rewarded/measured on two metrics - breadth and depth - a depth metric - leadership in your own specific project team where you add features. - a breadth metric - you've demonstrably shown that you've gotten other teams outside your own to contribute to your project effectively. Additionally and perhaps more importantly you must show that you can act in a supporting role on multiple other projects outside your own core project. Supporting other projects outside your core project include signing up for triage support, updating documentation, improving testing, etc. without frustrating the primary maintainers. IMHO - focusing on depth as the only way to technical career progression leads to feature creep, ball of mud codebases with high barriers to entry and silo thinking. Would be curious if/why this is controversial.

sytelus 4y ago
You should reward only based on customer satiesfaction and adoption.
- somethoughts 4y ago
  Agree - one feature that is missed w.r.t. long term customer satisfaction and adoption is long term support for previously delivered features. This is exacerbated when product managers/SW teams are mostly measured on new feature delivery metrics. The full feature lifecycle and reducing bus-factor across the entire existing product feature set is rarely considered as its not generally captured in OKR metrics.
  - gkop 4y ago
    You could count the number of customer complaints. Oh wait, we’re talking about Google..
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I think both are important but it’s not necessary for any one person to excel at both. Some will naturally be better at depth and others at breadth. As long as you acknowledge both types of contributions I think it will work out well.

lisper 4y ago

Another former Googler here (from waaaaaaayyyy back -- I was employee #104). The reason Google is the way it is, and many organizations are the way they are, is that they are trying to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success. Google initially succeeded by solving what was at the time a Really Hard Problem, and so the people at the top want to reproduce that by encouraging people to solve more Really Hard Problems. Apple has fallen into the exact same trap. Their initial success came from building a Cool New Thing, and so they are constantly trying to build the next Cool New Thing. The problem is that at some point the product has actually converged to a local design maximum and so making further changes to it in order to produce something New and Cool is not actually an improvement. But it doesn't work because it's sn inductive fallacy. Just because solving a Really Hard Problem or making a Cool New Thing led to success once does not mean that doing these things will lead to success in general. But the memory of that initial success is really hard to get past, especially when it was as earth-shattering as the initial Google search engine, or the Mac or the iPhone. (Apple has actually done better than most companies at reproducing their initial success. They've done it at least five times, with the Apple II, the Mac, OSX, the iPod and the iPhone. But then there is the touch bar, the butterfly keyboard, the flat look...)

brokencode 4y ago
I think Apple has done a fantastic job of incremental improvements on their products rather than chasing the next cool thing. Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better? For instance, they often resist new technologies like high refresh rate or OLED screens, 5G, etc., until they feel the technology is developed sufficiently and won’t impact battery life. There are other brands that compete by making a list of features rather than a coherent product. Of the examples you named, both the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard are gone now, and the latest Macs are the best Macs ever. That shows a willingness to try new things, while also showing that they have good judgement in the long term and a willingness to move away from what doesn’t work. Also, the iPad and Apple Watch haven’t been as important to Apple as the iPhone, but they are still original and category-defining products that I would call innovative. Not every new product needs to double your company’s market cap to be a big success in the category.

mathattack 4y ago

What’s more import for Senior leaders to do - solve hard problems or useful ones? If it’s the former they’re doing the right thing. If it’s the latter that explains a lot of their deprecation issues.

joshuamorton 4y ago

So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the same system for years? When do you stop promoting them? There's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine. Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, does he get promoted again? Once? Twice? Does he become a principal engineer, for adequately maintaining his corner of the world? The person who is really good and really effective at fixing user issues, first of all can't scale past a certain point, but second of all, likely doesn't have the the experience to design and shepherd the data storage system that also manages permissions across nested groups efficiently (one of these is what we'd expect of a solid L4, the other is https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/). You're asking for title inflation. Is that really what you want? What you really want is a different role, "maintenance eng" who can get paid more for doing the same work they were doing yesterday, and who needs to reinterview for SWE roles, because its very quickly obvious that a principal maintenance eng and a principal eng do very different things!

sytelus 4y ago
If a person is locked up in one feature/one product and unwilling to learn new things for the years then I do not think that person should be promoted. You can certainly give merit increases to keep up with inflation but that's about that. Ultimately, we all responding to market value of a person. That value remains unchanged for someone not learning anything new for years after the earned experience saturates. In many professions like doctors or pilots, experience never saturates and continues to increase person's market value however in other like cashier or barista that's not the case. So this opinion is job-dependent.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  But the person might have the knowledge to build on whatever the system is, without having the mandate to do so. He'd still be the best person to modify the system, but for whatever reason the business doesn't need the edits. Should you keep him happy just in case or let him find another job and take the option to upgrade with him?

summerlight 4y ago

> the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. This is the real problem, but people typically underestimate difficulty of correctly identifying "useful" problems at scale. Fixing a bug is nice, but correctly prioritizing bugs worth fixing is harder than said because most cases relevant engineers have limited contexts on UX and PM also has limited contexts on its difficulty. I don't deny that big techs have a bias toward solving "interesting" problems, but in many cases seemingly simple bugs are not that really easy to solve while not making any dent on business.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
> but in many cases seemingly simple bugs are not that really easy to solve while not making any dent on business I work at a big tech company and see this all the time. Bugs that clearly exist and are impacting users, but they're hard to solve and have no or very little business impact. It doesn't really make sense to work on them, but it's kind of sad they just get left :/.

hintymad 4y ago

Isn't this problem shared by pretty much every large company? Why is Google particularly bad?

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
I think Google has this worse than most because it has a relatively selective hiring process, large headcount, and is a mature company. The ratio of talent per scope is high, which mean there are less real problems left to solve per engineer.

lliamander 4y ago

> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. Playing the devil's advocate here, but shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors. The incentive problem to align people with the needs of the users is difficult. I imagine the best way to handle that would be through bonuses/profit sharing for high impact work, whereas promotions focus on difficulty of work.

scarface74 4y ago
Having technical expertise doesn’t mean much of anything if it doesn’t positively impact the bottom line.
- lliamander 4y ago
  If it doesn't impact the bottom line then business folks need to do a better job of capturing the value you could provide.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams. It even came out during the Oracle trial that Google only made about $26 billion in profit from the inception of Android to 2016. Apple makes more from Google in mobile by being paid for it to be the default search engine ($12-$18 billion a year) than Google makes from Android.
    - lliamander 4y ago
      > Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams. Is that true of other ad-tech driven companies as well? Companies like Meta and Twitter. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are used to charging users directly for some good or service. It may be that they are just better positioned to establish those other revenue streams.

autokad 4y ago

Tech Management wants to -not- promote people, so they try to make promotion difficult which inadvertently creates promotion driven culture. For instance, if they promoted people for working hard, then everyone would work hard and we (high level management at tech companies) cant just promote everyone. so they make it arbitrarily hard, such as at Google "only promote people who solve hard problems". I think most tech companies will have some flavor of that, like at Amazon "work on projects that have cross team company impact". Its all about trying to -not- promote people fokes, which ironically creates this promotion driven culture. After all, we are mostly college grads, and a lot of us are from the top schools (not even the majority, just a lot).

titzer 4y ago

> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured. I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people introduce bullshit measures and game them. It's pretty much impossible to measure long term impact, but nevertheless, impact[1] was one of the main three drivers. [1] Leadership, difficulty, impact are the three main components of a succesful packet, especially at L6 and above.

mindcrime 4y ago
It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured. Being "data focused" is probably a Good Thing in a very general sense, but there are real dangers that come with that. For example, there's a form of "data myopia" you can develop, which is best expressed by the old saw "data and optimization can help you get better at doing $SOMETHING, but don't tell you if you're doing the right $SOMETHING in the first place." I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people introduce bullshit measures and game them. And of course there's Goodhart's Law[1] which leads to situations where trying to be "data driven" actually makes things worse when people start trying to "game" the metrics. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

usrn 4y ago

It's much more boring and you don't hear much about it but it's ultimately more pleasant to run things this way.

bigcat123 4y ago

BurningFrog 4y ago

And this can and will go on until the $$ Billions from search/ads stop raining from the sky.

TuringNYC 4y ago

>> 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. Not saying this is the best thing, but it can get much, much worse at other places. I started my career at Accenture (then, Andersen Consulting). People go promoted for either sales (SrManagers or higher) or controlling issues (Managers and below.) Note, the aim was to control issues (documenting, writing up mitigation plans, briefing clients, deploying fixes, etc.) -- THE AIM WAS NOT TO PREVENT ISSUES. So code quality didnt get you promoted. Several years in, a group of individuals passed up for promotion realized this all-together and literally started turning a blind eye to minor bugs, which eventually passed into PROD. Then they would solve them (which is what Management wanted.) Shockingly they got kudos for controlling issues. Many got promoted. Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors.

samhw 4y ago
> Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors. I don't mean this as a slight at your comment - rather at the shockingness of the reality that your comment (really) needed to be said - but isn't this blatantly implied by the meaning of the word 'incentive'?? I'm astonished that people keep not realising this. The whole culture of OKRs/KPIs at startups feels like it's tempting this problem - I don't see why any but a very small number of companies should need to optimise metrics which are non-obvious. Having an OKR/KPI which one needs to deliberately decide on feels like a very pungent 'bad smell' of an XY problem.

dane-pgp 4y ago

> the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" So you're saying that the incentives misalignment at Google leads to engineers who aren't self-deprecating, and products which are self-deprecating?