3 ms·

> From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so G

> From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. I work at Google. What you say here is not true. Yes, Google is indeed often very bad at long term product strategy and has rebooted its chat offerings an embarrassing number of times. But "it shipped, fuck it if it works" is not actually a sufficient justification for promotions.

Hasu 5y ago
Interesting, this is not what I've heard, but my sources are obviously secondhand. I'll update my priors in that direction, although it makes whatever Google is doing make even less sense to me.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I think a big problem is that "Google bad" is a very engaging blog post and that, by virtue of being enormous, there are plenty of people who leave the company with bad feelings who are willing to write about it. This leads to a lot of highly visible writing about flaws within Google but largely from the perspective of people who were unhappy. There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization. I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.

3 ms·

> From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so G

by UncleMeat 5y ago

Hasu 5y ago
Interesting, this is not what I've heard, but my sources are obviously secondhand. I'll update my priors in that direction, although it makes whatever Google is doing make even less sense to me.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I think a big problem is that "Google bad" is a very engaging blog post and that, by virtue of being enormous, there are plenty of people who leave the company with bad feelings who are willing to write about it. This leads to a lot of highly visible writing about flaws within Google but largely from the perspective of people who were unhappy. There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization. I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.