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Manager at a different FAANG here. I had a very senior (not L9) engineer laid off on my team. The thing about super senior ICs is that they have super high expe

by harles 4y ago

Manager at a different FAANG here. I had a very senior (not L9) engineer laid off on my team. The thing about super senior ICs is that they have super high expectations, ones that are easy to miss. It’s almost silly every performance review season, we sit down and go “what did this person do to redefine the industry this cycle?”. Unfortunately, when the answer is “not much” or they simply wrote great code, they get a low rating. At places where curves for ratings exist, these folks frequently fill in the lower portions of those curves - despite appearing to crush it from the outside, they’re just not hitting all expectations. The end result of all of this is that when senior leaders set filters for who is laid off, these folks get hit. Multiple cycles of subpar ratings, it’s an easy decision looking at the numbers. Maybe not a good decision, but that’s where these systems have led.

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MuffinFlavored 4y ago
How often is an L9 engineer "eccentric" and not very fun to work with? I'm going to guess not often because... you don't get to that level without learning how to work well with managers/co-workers, right?
- el_benhameen 4y ago
  Huh, that’s an interesting point. Personally, when I see “L9 IC”, I assume that the person is an extremely eccentric genius who likely does not work especially well with a team. But I’m not an L9, nor do I work at a FAANG, so who knows.
  - log_n 4y ago
    Those kinds of people are generally stuck at a lower level. L7/8/9 is very much a political game. To get there (generally) you need to make your entire org/company look very good, and generally to make your team look good you need to work well with them so that you can convince them to work on the high impact projects that you identify.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    It is nearly impossible to have the impact required for these levels by building a thing yourself. These companies are too big. You can't just say "I built a better database" because even if you somehow did to that you'd need to convince the company to shift to it. L9s are usually having industry-wide impact and that involves a shit ton of just talking with people and convincing them that your path through the forest is the right one. You need the right ideas, but you also need the skills to convince a whole bunch of smart people, often at other companies entirely, that your ideas are right.
- yolovoe 4y ago
  I work on AWS and interact with a fair bit of Principal and Sr Principals. None are "eccentric." Highly competent, great at processing high volumes of information and context switching, asking amazing questions, ready to help, and really quick to pick up new things, and debug. I think Sr Principal and Distinguished are achieved by excellence AND tenure. Too much context/tribal knowledge is required so hard for anyone to be effective at a high level otherwise. To be clear, these people often times deal a lot with operational issues. And they're keeping track of a lot of initiatives and fires. So sometimes I see some lose patience in meetings against managers/leadership. But that's understandable I think given their stress. Happens pretty rarely.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Getting promoted requires the "people skills" to put the packet together and get the recommendations. If you are too eccentric, people will flat-out tell you that when you ask for a recommendation. ("I don't think you're quite ready for Level X, you need to work on Y.") Certainly you can cherry-pick who you ask, but if you have enough people that like you enough to get you promoted, you probably aren't a big pain to work with. I crossed paths with the occasional L8 or L9 at Google and everyone I met was very pleasant and enjoyable to interact with. And smart, it goes without saying. Not everyone is a perfect angel 24/7 (one of my favorite high-level engineer's hobby was to antagonize our Director, probably decreasing his manager's lifespan by about 10 years due to the stress), but I guess one social skill you can have is knowing what bridges you can set on fire for your own entertainment. (I was also entertained.) The "eccentric" folks tend to find their own way, outside of corporate promotions. You don't have to be nice to anyone to win a chess tournament or make a popular open-source library. You just do those things, and your work speaks for itself. Those are kind of more narrow areas in which you can succeed and measure, where Big Tech promotions are a little bit more nuanced, requiring not only technical excellence, but some social skills and navigation of corporate politics.
taeric 4y ago
This makes basically no sense. Unless you are going to admit that you fucked up and peter principled the employee, "raising the bar" for them is silly. This would be the equivalent for a pro baseball team laying off their entire roster because nobody on the team showed the growth that those in the feeder teams showed. A bold bet, to be sure. Not one that is likely to keep a winning team. That is to say, if you have people that you promoted up the ranks to high level contributor, and then find that you can't use them, that is on you. And shows a sad state of management.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I see parent's point as how you'd evaluate the performance of an international superstar in your team. You'd do reviews where they'd have top performance, but not 3x or 4x more than the guy right below them. And if their presence didn't push your team to be #1 in that season, you could have an argument to replace them for someone cheaper and 90% as good. Of course, their sheer presence could be a booster for marketing for instance, and there's a lot more going on, so usually you'd keep them around even if on paper it doesn't make sense, but it would look like a complex balancing act.
  - taeric 4y ago
    I somewhat get that, but if you are promoting people for amazing hits, then you are doing it wrong. You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project, but for being a solid addition to the team that provides steady progress.
    - nradov 4y ago
      It's tough to distinguish between luck and skill. A lot of cognitive biases come into play in performance evaluation, and managers have to make decisions based on very little data.
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      > You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project, At Google you are explicitly rewarded at L5 and up for picking the right project to work on. It's wisdom of the crowds. You pick what project you're working on and you should be picking a good high-impact one that actually brings value to the company, for which you might be promoted. This ensures that incentives are aligned. Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it. You need to be proactive about ensuring that you're working on something valuable.
beebmam 4y ago
It's pretty clear, having been part of the hiring and firing process of several large US tech giants, that these companies have zero idea what they're doing in the performance/review process. This kind of bullshit exists solely to save face in front of shareholders. It has zero to do with running a successful technology company.
causality0 4y ago
That sounds like the equivalent of picking a random half of your applications and throwing them in the garbage because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
ngc248 4y ago
All this means is getting promoted and sustaining progress on the tech track is very difficult. Compared to that I feel promotion on the management track is easier, all you need to do is get more people under you.
cortesoft 4y ago
Maybe... don't do that? It isn't like this process is dictated by physics or something, that sounds incredibly inefficient and not that difficult to fix.
stuckkeys 4y ago
I had a friend of mine that was let go from MS after 25 years. I was under the same impression. Thinking the dude was probably not doing anything productive. But then, he shows me all his positive feedback that he got on his reviews…shit does not add up. My guess is, they created this big layoff list. Now they trigger competition, so they can higher at lower pay and get same results. This is just my take at this. I never worked for any FAANG, and I will never do so. But it was just shocking, not surprised but just shocked for my friend. Maybe they were just cutting out big salary paid people. Idk. These people devoted their lives and got shafted.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Isn't this obvious? The quiet quitting and demands for remaining at wfh coupled with other corporations cranking up prices for their products (from energy to bread) made for an uppity worker class. Musk practically telegraphed the corporate leadership consensus as the way to address this. Extreme job insecurity will do its magic. p.s. the interesting thing to find out is how your friend's former coworkers, peers and juniors, who got to hear about his layoff are taking the news. Shocked? 'Shocked into what' line of queries could enlighten the forum as to the 'wisdom' of company X's payroll triage.
  - t-writescode 4y ago
    > quiet quitting Working one's wage.
jackcviers3 4y ago
I can't think of a single famous software engineer that continuously redefined the entire industry, every single year. Like, some language designers and tooling creators have redefined the industry once a decade. But every year? For what definition of redefine does that apply?
- fragmede 4y ago
  Linus Torvalds took 14 years between releasing Linux and git, so he's out.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Or that loser Steve Jobs. Look at him. I mean he had a good few years in the beginning - Apple I (1976), the Apple II (1977), the Apple Lisa (1978), but then fails to do anything redefining until the Macintosh (1984), takes another break for 4 years until the NeXT Computer (1988), 10 years! until the iMac (1998). 2001 was a good year for him with iTunes (2001), iPod (2001) but again takes a 2 year break before iPhone(2007) and then skips out again for 2 years until the iPad in 2010. Or just look at all the gaps in the honors and awards section in wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Honors_and_awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Honors_and_awards Is there anybody that's "redefined an industry" every year running for more than 3 years straight?
- menaerus 4y ago
  None. It's all plain BS that capitalistic companies are using as a leverage to gamify the market. Engineers are particularly bad in playing this game and are easy to deceive so that they start to believe it is a real thing (as seen in some comments above). When a football team does not meet the expectations, it is the manager who gets blamed for the failure and who gets the sack and rarely the players. We, sadly, live in a different world.
phantomathkg 4y ago
This is just absolutely awful. We all have now knowing that infinite economical growth is nothing but a delusion. Why can't the management and the share holder apply the same to the company and employee? It is simply not possible to expect human being to continuously grow without a limit. Once they reach the top level, what they should do is actually maintaining the same good output and run a marathon instead.
- pas 4y ago
  someone said managers were affected more than engineering in this layoffs. also read the comments about this L9 promotion game. they knew they were expected to stay on top of their field. infinite economic growth is possible, but not infinite constant 2%, and definitely not the US tech sector hiring frenzy that went on for years
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    > infinite economic growth is possible Only of you count inflation as economic growth.
    - pas 4y ago
      inflation is a nominal thing, I'm talking about growth in real terms. there are two kinds of growth, extensive and intensive. the first one is using more natural resources, expanding to mine the ocean and the moon, and so on. the second one is where the intensity of the economic activity increases, so with the same input there are more outputs. technological change helps to reduce waste, increase efficiency. investing in infrastructure and other capital goods allows for increased productivity. one big thing is simply investing in people to be more productive, eg. increasing "human capital". of course eventually sustainable growth has to approach some asymptote, and eventually physical limits kick in. (free energy in the universe gets used up.) however our growth trajectory is very mild compared to those limits, so in practice we can continue increasing both the intensive and expansive growth asymptotically.
      - 4y ago
rqtwteye 4y ago
That’s why it’s much safer to move up on the management track. An IC on a higher level almost has to be able to walk on water and constantly produce outstanding work whereas for managers it’s mucb more possible to do your job as usual without producing breakthroughs.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  I think the upper middle managers were actually hit harder in this layoff than the higher level eng ICs.
  - aix1 4y ago
    Anecdotally, this rings true. However, I also wanted to point out that "Distinguished SWE" != "IC". There are plenty of L8/L9 Google employees who are on technical ladders but whose jobs are mainly -- or solely -- about people management. Those people have Principal/Distinguished X as their title. This was very common in the olden days and remains true for long-tenured employees. Google's been moving away from this model by requiring that employees move onto a management ladder once their job is mainly about people management. However, I doubt anyone would want to piss off all those Principal and Distinguished SWEs/RSes by forcing them onto a different ladder and replacing their titles.
- xmprt 4y ago
  The flipside is that it's very difficult to get promoted as a manager. As an IC you can at least show some skills to prove that you deserve to be at the next level. A manager can usually only get promoted if there's enough scope or if there's an opening at the higher level (eg. senior manager left).
  - tehlike 4y ago
    You should check the percentage of LN for N>=7 for ic and manager track.
  - commiepatrol 4y ago
    From my experience it’s the exact opposite
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microtonal 4y ago
“what did this person do to redefine the industry this cycle?” I know that you are not at Google, but I can't help reading this as: no surprise that Google has a graveyard of 'industry-redefining' products. or they simply wrote great code Well, that explains the quality of some of the stuff coming out of Apple and Google.
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oxfordmale 4y ago
From the data (the analysis was posted a few days ago on HN), it appears FANGS have been targeting employees with a long tenure in their layoffs. These are generally more expensive and from a management helicopter view don't appear to be value for money.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
This is so true, when people were begging to be promoted because they wanted more money I would have "the talk" with them which was basically, "Look, if you get a raise and no promotion, expectations will be the same next year as they are this year, so all good. If you get a promotion then expectations for next year, AND EVERY YEAR AFTER NEXT YEAR, are going to be higher. If you've got that in you, okay then but there isn't a 'ya know, I'd rather not be this senior' button, the only way to cut those expectation cords is to leave." Scott McNealy would tell people on promotion, "One step up, one step closer to the door." which captured this same thought. But all of that is peanuts compared to the next step, which is that now, assuming they still want to work at a company, they have to go out and interview and set their salary expectations to something that someone is willing to hire them at. This seems especially hard for the senior folks I've interviewed coming from Google because so much of their expertise is on systems that only exist inside of Google.
- donalhunt 4y ago
  A lot of the experience is transferable even if the tools are different. The industry has adopted many opensource products that have equivalents at Google (bazle, Prometheus, Grafana, containers, etc). The strongest asset any xoogler has is likely to be bias-to-action and engineering maturity (used to having to complete work to a high standard). There is business value there for companies hiring. I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp. In some markets an L5 could expect at 50-60% comp cut (more for more senior roles).
  - ChuckMcM 4y ago
    >>> I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp. This captures it but there is nuance here. Many people, perhaps a majority of people, especially in the engineering professions, have a mental model where "how much I'm paid" is the "score" for "how good I am at my job." So when someone with this mental model is offered a position at half, or even two thirds the compensation level for doing what they had been doing before, cannot get past thinking "This company clearly doesn't realize how good I am if they aren't willing to pay me what I'm 'worth.'" So they pass on the offer. And weeks, sometimes months, go by and they can see that eventually they are going to run out of money, so they take one of these offers but they resent it. And in resenting it they don't bring any sort of reasonable attitude to work and grumble about how "it could be so much better if you just did it the way I suggest" or something like that. And they spend a year, at most two, until either they are asked to leave or they quit in disgust. If they have saved enough money to maintain an acceptable lifestyle without dedicated employment, they will often join the ranks of the 'self employed' where occasionally they consult but mostly they don't. If they haven't saved enough money they sometimes move to a new area, cut contact with friends where it is too embarrassing for them to say they are "unemployable"[1], and get by on smaller work in a reduced cost environment. Bottom line is that it is a tough time for these folks. They are being thrust into a self examination situation that they may not have prepared themselves for. I have nothing but empathy for people in this conundrum. I walked through that fire and came out the other side stronger but not everyone does. [1] They aren't, it really is just a disconnect between their self image and market rate for their skills.
howinteresting 4y ago
I'm sorry but Facebook's performance review process (this sounds a lot like Facebook's) is not sane.
everdrive 4y ago
So it’s your fault, then? I don’t really want the industry redefined constantly, but some subset of zealots ha resigned this as “success.”
dekhn 4y ago
Why are you even performance reviewing an L9? That's sort of missing the point. For all you know, their contributions could be profound and subtle and totally invisible to you and many others, while still having massive impact.
- foogazi 4y ago
  > For all you know, their contributions could be profound and subtle and totally invisible to you and many others, while still having massive impact. How do you square having invisible impact ?
fatnoah 4y ago
In a past life, I was part of calibrations for L8/L9 at a FAANG. Even though "impacts the industry" is part of the spec, it didn't come up in calibrations I sat in on. Major impact on the most important company initiatives was really the bar that I saw, but writing a bunch of code definitely did not meet the bar. Performance ratings seemed to either be "Met" or "Greatly Exceeded" as the work of these folks often spanned multiple review cycles, so some stuff my be In Progress & On Track for one cycle, but has landed and achieved impact in a following one.
agentultra 4y ago
It's weird I think. From the employee end, the contract is: you take my time and expertise and give me money/benefits/etc. Yet performance review rating systems place, "did the job well and met all professional obligations," somewhere in the middle-to-low end of their, "scales." So even if you, employee, come in as a highly experienced individual with plenty of skills and you perform all of your duties and fulfill your contractual obligations to the letter: it's not enough. Just more capitalism at work. The effect this has on human organization of labour is hilarious sometimes. It seems to me that when your performance review scale is based around these unrealistic expectations then workers have to readjust the way they see their roles. It's not enough to do a good job! One must exceed expectations to be treated with respect. And when we start dangling carrots like that people will find many clever ways to get it with as little effort as possible. Hop around teams to find the lowest-performing team in order to stand out. Sounds great from the organization's perspective: you're spreading your experience around and lifting up all boats! Except that knowledge transfer almost never happens and team churn is highly disruptive on software projects. So things end up in constant state of technical debt. Sabotage your co-workers and steal recognition for their work/ideas/etc! Hoard your domain knowledge and prevent others from getting in on your work so that you stand out come review season! Make sure you're good friends with the team lead so that you get all of the preferred projects! All kinds of fun behaviours arise.

by harles 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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MuffinFlavored 4y ago

How often is an L9 engineer "eccentric" and not very fun to work with? I'm going to guess not often because... you don't get to that level without learning how to work well with managers/co-workers, right?

el_benhameen 4y ago
Huh, that’s an interesting point. Personally, when I see “L9 IC”, I assume that the person is an extremely eccentric genius who likely does not work especially well with a team. But I’m not an L9, nor do I work at a FAANG, so who knows.
- log_n 4y ago
  Those kinds of people are generally stuck at a lower level. L7/8/9 is very much a political game. To get there (generally) you need to make your entire org/company look very good, and generally to make your team look good you need to work well with them so that you can convince them to work on the high impact projects that you identify.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  It is nearly impossible to have the impact required for these levels by building a thing yourself. These companies are too big. You can't just say "I built a better database" because even if you somehow did to that you'd need to convince the company to shift to it. L9s are usually having industry-wide impact and that involves a shit ton of just talking with people and convincing them that your path through the forest is the right one. You need the right ideas, but you also need the skills to convince a whole bunch of smart people, often at other companies entirely, that your ideas are right.
yolovoe 4y ago
I work on AWS and interact with a fair bit of Principal and Sr Principals. None are "eccentric." Highly competent, great at processing high volumes of information and context switching, asking amazing questions, ready to help, and really quick to pick up new things, and debug. I think Sr Principal and Distinguished are achieved by excellence AND tenure. Too much context/tribal knowledge is required so hard for anyone to be effective at a high level otherwise. To be clear, these people often times deal a lot with operational issues. And they're keeping track of a lot of initiatives and fires. So sometimes I see some lose patience in meetings against managers/leadership. But that's understandable I think given their stress. Happens pretty rarely.
jrockway 4y ago
Getting promoted requires the "people skills" to put the packet together and get the recommendations. If you are too eccentric, people will flat-out tell you that when you ask for a recommendation. ("I don't think you're quite ready for Level X, you need to work on Y.") Certainly you can cherry-pick who you ask, but if you have enough people that like you enough to get you promoted, you probably aren't a big pain to work with. I crossed paths with the occasional L8 or L9 at Google and everyone I met was very pleasant and enjoyable to interact with. And smart, it goes without saying. Not everyone is a perfect angel 24/7 (one of my favorite high-level engineer's hobby was to antagonize our Director, probably decreasing his manager's lifespan by about 10 years due to the stress), but I guess one social skill you can have is knowing what bridges you can set on fire for your own entertainment. (I was also entertained.) The "eccentric" folks tend to find their own way, outside of corporate promotions. You don't have to be nice to anyone to win a chess tournament or make a popular open-source library. You just do those things, and your work speaks for itself. Those are kind of more narrow areas in which you can succeed and measure, where Big Tech promotions are a little bit more nuanced, requiring not only technical excellence, but some social skills and navigation of corporate politics.

taeric 4y ago

This makes basically no sense. Unless you are going to admit that you fucked up and peter principled the employee, "raising the bar" for them is silly. This would be the equivalent for a pro baseball team laying off their entire roster because nobody on the team showed the growth that those in the feeder teams showed. A bold bet, to be sure. Not one that is likely to keep a winning team. That is to say, if you have people that you promoted up the ranks to high level contributor, and then find that you can't use them, that is on you. And shows a sad state of management.

makeitdouble 4y ago
I see parent's point as how you'd evaluate the performance of an international superstar in your team. You'd do reviews where they'd have top performance, but not 3x or 4x more than the guy right below them. And if their presence didn't push your team to be #1 in that season, you could have an argument to replace them for someone cheaper and 90% as good. Of course, their sheer presence could be a booster for marketing for instance, and there's a lot more going on, so usually you'd keep them around even if on paper it doesn't make sense, but it would look like a complex balancing act.
- taeric 4y ago
  I somewhat get that, but if you are promoting people for amazing hits, then you are doing it wrong. You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project, but for being a solid addition to the team that provides steady progress.
  - nradov 4y ago
    It's tough to distinguish between luck and skill. A lot of cognitive biases come into play in performance evaluation, and managers have to make decisions based on very little data.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    > You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project, At Google you are explicitly rewarded at L5 and up for picking the right project to work on. It's wisdom of the crowds. You pick what project you're working on and you should be picking a good high-impact one that actually brings value to the company, for which you might be promoted. This ensures that incentives are aligned. Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it. You need to be proactive about ensuring that you're working on something valuable.

beebmam 4y ago

It's pretty clear, having been part of the hiring and firing process of several large US tech giants, that these companies have zero idea what they're doing in the performance/review process. This kind of bullshit exists solely to save face in front of shareholders. It has zero to do with running a successful technology company.

causality0 4y ago

That sounds like the equivalent of picking a random half of your applications and throwing them in the garbage because you don't want to hire unlucky people.

ngc248 4y ago

All this means is getting promoted and sustaining progress on the tech track is very difficult. Compared to that I feel promotion on the management track is easier, all you need to do is get more people under you.

cortesoft 4y ago

Maybe... don't do that? It isn't like this process is dictated by physics or something, that sounds incredibly inefficient and not that difficult to fix.

stuckkeys 4y ago

I had a friend of mine that was let go from MS after 25 years. I was under the same impression. Thinking the dude was probably not doing anything productive. But then, he shows me all his positive feedback that he got on his reviews…shit does not add up. My guess is, they created this big layoff list. Now they trigger competition, so they can higher at lower pay and get same results. This is just my take at this. I never worked for any FAANG, and I will never do so. But it was just shocking, not surprised but just shocked for my friend. Maybe they were just cutting out big salary paid people. Idk. These people devoted their lives and got shafted.

eternalban 4y ago
Isn't this obvious? The quiet quitting and demands for remaining at wfh coupled with other corporations cranking up prices for their products (from energy to bread) made for an uppity worker class. Musk practically telegraphed the corporate leadership consensus as the way to address this. Extreme job insecurity will do its magic. p.s. the interesting thing to find out is how your friend's former coworkers, peers and juniors, who got to hear about his layoff are taking the news. Shocked? 'Shocked into what' line of queries could enlighten the forum as to the 'wisdom' of company X's payroll triage.
- t-writescode 4y ago
  > quiet quitting Working one's wage.

jackcviers3 4y ago

I can't think of a single famous software engineer that continuously redefined the entire industry, every single year. Like, some language designers and tooling creators have redefined the industry once a decade. But every year? For what definition of redefine does that apply?

fragmede 4y ago
Linus Torvalds took 14 years between releasing Linux and git, so he's out.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Or that loser Steve Jobs. Look at him. I mean he had a good few years in the beginning - Apple I (1976), the Apple II (1977), the Apple Lisa (1978), but then fails to do anything redefining until the Macintosh (1984), takes another break for 4 years until the NeXT Computer (1988), 10 years! until the iMac (1998). 2001 was a good year for him with iTunes (2001), iPod (2001) but again takes a 2 year break before iPhone(2007) and then skips out again for 2 years until the iPad in 2010. Or just look at all the gaps in the honors and awards section in wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Honors_and_awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Honors_and_awards Is there anybody that's "redefined an industry" every year running for more than 3 years straight?
menaerus 4y ago
None. It's all plain BS that capitalistic companies are using as a leverage to gamify the market. Engineers are particularly bad in playing this game and are easy to deceive so that they start to believe it is a real thing (as seen in some comments above). When a football team does not meet the expectations, it is the manager who gets blamed for the failure and who gets the sack and rarely the players. We, sadly, live in a different world.

phantomathkg 4y ago

This is just absolutely awful. We all have now knowing that infinite economical growth is nothing but a delusion. Why can't the management and the share holder apply the same to the company and employee? It is simply not possible to expect human being to continuously grow without a limit. Once they reach the top level, what they should do is actually maintaining the same good output and run a marathon instead.

pas 4y ago
someone said managers were affected more than engineering in this layoffs. also read the comments about this L9 promotion game. they knew they were expected to stay on top of their field. infinite economic growth is possible, but not infinite constant 2%, and definitely not the US tech sector hiring frenzy that went on for years
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > infinite economic growth is possible Only of you count inflation as economic growth.
  - pas 4y ago
    inflation is a nominal thing, I'm talking about growth in real terms. there are two kinds of growth, extensive and intensive. the first one is using more natural resources, expanding to mine the ocean and the moon, and so on. the second one is where the intensity of the economic activity increases, so with the same input there are more outputs. technological change helps to reduce waste, increase efficiency. investing in infrastructure and other capital goods allows for increased productivity. one big thing is simply investing in people to be more productive, eg. increasing "human capital". of course eventually sustainable growth has to approach some asymptote, and eventually physical limits kick in. (free energy in the universe gets used up.) however our growth trajectory is very mild compared to those limits, so in practice we can continue increasing both the intensive and expansive growth asymptotically.
    - 4y ago

rqtwteye 4y ago

That’s why it’s much safer to move up on the management track. An IC on a higher level almost has to be able to walk on water and constantly produce outstanding work whereas for managers it’s mucb more possible to do your job as usual without producing breakthroughs.

CydeWeys 4y ago
I think the upper middle managers were actually hit harder in this layoff than the higher level eng ICs.
- aix1 4y ago
  Anecdotally, this rings true. However, I also wanted to point out that "Distinguished SWE" != "IC". There are plenty of L8/L9 Google employees who are on technical ladders but whose jobs are mainly -- or solely -- about people management. Those people have Principal/Distinguished X as their title. This was very common in the olden days and remains true for long-tenured employees. Google's been moving away from this model by requiring that employees move onto a management ladder once their job is mainly about people management. However, I doubt anyone would want to piss off all those Principal and Distinguished SWEs/RSes by forcing them onto a different ladder and replacing their titles.
xmprt 4y ago
The flipside is that it's very difficult to get promoted as a manager. As an IC you can at least show some skills to prove that you deserve to be at the next level. A manager can usually only get promoted if there's enough scope or if there's an opening at the higher level (eg. senior manager left).
- tehlike 4y ago
  You should check the percentage of LN for N>=7 for ic and manager track.
- commiepatrol 4y ago
  From my experience it’s the exact opposite

deleted 4y ago

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microtonal 4y ago

“what did this person do to redefine the industry this cycle?” I know that you are not at Google, but I can't help reading this as: no surprise that Google has a graveyard of 'industry-redefining' products. or they simply wrote great code Well, that explains the quality of some of the stuff coming out of Apple and Google.

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oxfordmale 4y ago

From the data (the analysis was posted a few days ago on HN), it appears FANGS have been targeting employees with a long tenure in their layoffs. These are generally more expensive and from a management helicopter view don't appear to be value for money.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

This is so true, when people were begging to be promoted because they wanted more money I would have "the talk" with them which was basically, "Look, if you get a raise and no promotion, expectations will be the same next year as they are this year, so all good. If you get a promotion then expectations for next year, AND EVERY YEAR AFTER NEXT YEAR, are going to be higher. If you've got that in you, okay then but there isn't a 'ya know, I'd rather not be this senior' button, the only way to cut those expectation cords is to leave." Scott McNealy would tell people on promotion, "One step up, one step closer to the door." which captured this same thought. But all of that is peanuts compared to the next step, which is that now, assuming they still want to work at a company, they have to go out and interview and set their salary expectations to something that someone is willing to hire them at. This seems especially hard for the senior folks I've interviewed coming from Google because so much of their expertise is on systems that only exist inside of Google.

donalhunt 4y ago
A lot of the experience is transferable even if the tools are different. The industry has adopted many opensource products that have equivalents at Google (bazle, Prometheus, Grafana, containers, etc). The strongest asset any xoogler has is likely to be bias-to-action and engineering maturity (used to having to complete work to a high standard). There is business value there for companies hiring. I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp. In some markets an L5 could expect at 50-60% comp cut (more for more senior roles).
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  >>> I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp. This captures it but there is nuance here. Many people, perhaps a majority of people, especially in the engineering professions, have a mental model where "how much I'm paid" is the "score" for "how good I am at my job." So when someone with this mental model is offered a position at half, or even two thirds the compensation level for doing what they had been doing before, cannot get past thinking "This company clearly doesn't realize how good I am if they aren't willing to pay me what I'm 'worth.'" So they pass on the offer. And weeks, sometimes months, go by and they can see that eventually they are going to run out of money, so they take one of these offers but they resent it. And in resenting it they don't bring any sort of reasonable attitude to work and grumble about how "it could be so much better if you just did it the way I suggest" or something like that. And they spend a year, at most two, until either they are asked to leave or they quit in disgust. If they have saved enough money to maintain an acceptable lifestyle without dedicated employment, they will often join the ranks of the 'self employed' where occasionally they consult but mostly they don't. If they haven't saved enough money they sometimes move to a new area, cut contact with friends where it is too embarrassing for them to say they are "unemployable"[1], and get by on smaller work in a reduced cost environment. Bottom line is that it is a tough time for these folks. They are being thrust into a self examination situation that they may not have prepared themselves for. I have nothing but empathy for people in this conundrum. I walked through that fire and came out the other side stronger but not everyone does. [1] They aren't, it really is just a disconnect between their self image and market rate for their skills.

howinteresting 4y ago

I'm sorry but Facebook's performance review process (this sounds a lot like Facebook's) is not sane.

everdrive 4y ago

So it’s your fault, then? I don’t really want the industry redefined constantly, but some subset of zealots ha resigned this as “success.”

dekhn 4y ago

Why are you even performance reviewing an L9? That's sort of missing the point. For all you know, their contributions could be profound and subtle and totally invisible to you and many others, while still having massive impact.

foogazi 4y ago
> For all you know, their contributions could be profound and subtle and totally invisible to you and many others, while still having massive impact. How do you square having invisible impact ?

fatnoah 4y ago

In a past life, I was part of calibrations for L8/L9 at a FAANG. Even though "impacts the industry" is part of the spec, it didn't come up in calibrations I sat in on. Major impact on the most important company initiatives was really the bar that I saw, but writing a bunch of code definitely did not meet the bar. Performance ratings seemed to either be "Met" or "Greatly Exceeded" as the work of these folks often spanned multiple review cycles, so some stuff my be In Progress & On Track for one cycle, but has landed and achieved impact in a following one.

agentultra 4y ago

It's weird I think. From the employee end, the contract is: you take my time and expertise and give me money/benefits/etc. Yet performance review rating systems place, "did the job well and met all professional obligations," somewhere in the middle-to-low end of their, "scales." So even if you, employee, come in as a highly experienced individual with plenty of skills and you perform all of your duties and fulfill your contractual obligations to the letter: it's not enough. Just more capitalism at work. The effect this has on human organization of labour is hilarious sometimes. It seems to me that when your performance review scale is based around these unrealistic expectations then workers have to readjust the way they see their roles. It's not enough to do a good job! One must exceed expectations to be treated with respect. And when we start dangling carrots like that people will find many clever ways to get it with as little effort as possible. Hop around teams to find the lowest-performing team in order to stand out. Sounds great from the organization's perspective: you're spreading your experience around and lifting up all boats! Except that knowledge transfer almost never happens and team churn is highly disruptive on software projects. So things end up in constant state of technical debt. Sabotage your co-workers and steal recognition for their work/ideas/etc! Hoard your domain knowledge and prevent others from getting in on your work so that you stand out come review season! Make sure you're good friends with the team lead so that you get all of the preferred projects! All kinds of fun behaviours arise.