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The performance review process has a small impact on salary. The promo process is not based on value or difficulty, but on the size of the organization that on
by H8crilA 3y ago
The performance review process has a small impact on salary.
The promo process is not based on value or difficulty, but on the size of the organization that one is running. This is also true for higher level ICs, except they do not manage people, but rather manage/lead projects (which then have a certain amount of people involved).
Here's a rough breakdown:
- L4 -> 1 person
- L5 -> 1-3 people
- L6 -> ~7 people
- L7 -> ~25 people
- L8 -> ~70 people
The approximate 3x difference between the levels is also found in other organizations, for example in armies: division ~= 3 brigades, brigade ~= 3 battalions, battalion ~= 3 companies, company ~= 3 platoons.
Misunderstanding this is the source of almost all frustration with the promo process. This process is designed to build and expand the organization, not reward awesomeness. There are of course deviations from the simple schema I listed here, but this is the hard reference point.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoPerf feeds into promotions, which are the real way to raise your long-term salary (both inside and outside of Google).
- fcpk 3y agoThis is a terrible process unfortunatelly. Raising the salary should be related to the usefulness of the person to the company, and not the breadth/impact of their work. This leads to terrible things like gaming the system to get high impact/leadership projects to get raises which comes with huge side effects, like projects getting abandonned fast, being deprecated in favor of new shiny promo-bringing things. But this is not just a Google specific issue, and it is quite widespread in the industry. Google however suffered from this especially due to its obsessive culture of pay-for-perf and by ignoring simple facts: - inflation means that your salaries should raise regardless of performance. if you only tail the market by adjusting salaries only if the market changes, then you are 1 year late(at least). This isn't a problem in an economy with low inflation, but is a huge problem in one with much higher inflation. - there is a significant number of people needed to maintain projects that won't show large impact. Those people need to be at the very least recognized and compensated. - making new products is great, but it requires huge amounts of ressources to do at Google scale from the get-go. A wider strategy is much needed, which Google obviously lacked for almost a decade.
- H8crilA 3y agoPerf is almost irrelevant for promotions beyond level 5.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThat was not my experience. A long run of good perf scores is clearly not sufficient for a promotion at that level, but it is necessary.