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People are grouping all FAANGs together in this thread. But this wasn't my experience at Google at all. It's impossible to get promoted past L5 (or even maybe p

People are grouping all FAANGs together in this thread. But this wasn't my experience at Google at all. It's impossible to get promoted past L5 (or even maybe past L4) with a short term-focused approach like this. And, at least at the lower levels (up to L5), you only need to be self-promotional every 6-12 months for perf.

UncleMeat 4y ago
In fact, "long time horizon" is literally in the text of the L6 expectations.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation. For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The promo committee and even your manager won't see through it, unless you make it stupidly obvious. Peers won't complain openly to avoid bad vibes (why should they care), so even if there was time for scrutiny (there isn't), there's virtually no paper trail. In reality, you are seen as proactive, a fixer, someone who takes care of problems when they come up. A good citizen. Some even do this unconsciously, because they overestimate their abilities and over-engineer things that break because it's infeasible to reason about complexity monsters in the first place.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    And yet, in promo reviews for L6 I've experienced, this discussion of "long time horizon" comes up basically every time. The OP advice of "ignore anything long term" will be almost a hard blocker here.
    - klabb3 4y ago
      I'm saying that each criteria is open to interpretation, so you can very well satisfy any of them if you play your cards right and craft a good narrative. I've seen directors and VPs take on new projects, get praised, hold talks, get promoted and then the project is abandoned a year later. Failing upwards is very much a thing in FAANG. Not always, but it happens.

UncleMeat 4y ago

In fact, "long time horizon" is literally in the text of the L6 expectations.

klabb3 4y ago
> literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation. For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The promo committee and even your manager won't see through it, unless you make it stupidly obvious. Peers won't complain openly to avoid bad vibes (why should they care), so even if there was time for scrutiny (there isn't), there's virtually no paper trail. In reality, you are seen as proactive, a fixer, someone who takes care of problems when they come up. A good citizen. Some even do this unconsciously, because they overestimate their abilities and over-engineer things that break because it's infeasible to reason about complexity monsters in the first place.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  And yet, in promo reviews for L6 I've experienced, this discussion of "long time horizon" comes up basically every time. The OP advice of "ignore anything long term" will be almost a hard blocker here.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    I'm saying that each criteria is open to interpretation, so you can very well satisfy any of them if you play your cards right and craft a good narrative. I've seen directors and VPs take on new projects, get praised, hold talks, get promoted and then the project is abandoned a year later. Failing upwards is very much a thing in FAANG. Not always, but it happens.