6 ms·
You get the behavior you incentivize. In the “early days”, design docs were a tool to agree on a direction and provide context to your coworkers about what you’
by t8sr 2y ago
You get the behavior you incentivize. In the “early days”, design docs were a tool to agree on a direction and provide context to your coworkers about what you’re doing. Later, as new people joined at an exponential rate, they were told by well meaning managers to write the docs for perf reasons, and things kind of spiraled from there. Google’s culture became a cargo cult of itself.
Some companies I worked at after Google were reluctant to discuss their promotion process in detail, because they saw what happens when people microoptimize for it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Arainach 2y agoMicrooptimizing for what the cargo cult believes gets you promoted is strictly worse than microoptimizing for what actually gets you promoted.
- klabb3 2y agoIt’s a meh from me - either is bad. If you are in a highly complex and professional field (in the traditional sense of the word) single axis optimization hollows out the whole craft. Engineering is delicate and constant battling of tradeoffs, and decision consequences are often delayed by longer than average tenure, let alone a 6 month perf cycle. The more you McKinsey the process, the more mediocre and incoherent the results.
- Arainach 2y agoYou get what you measure. You can't hire smart motivated people and then be surprised when they figure out to optimize for their rewards. If you want a team that lands stable customer-loved products, make THAT your performance review. Turns out that's hard to do objectively and consistently.
- lupire 2y agoAccording to your other comment, then, a company that "lands stable customer-loved products" would be a "hotbed of nepotism" that people shouldn't work for.
- Arainach 2y agoNonsense - you can have documented metrics which are known and tied to performance. For example: * Require features to be launched for a period of time rather than in development or shoved out the door a week before perf * Have metrics for customer satisfaction and oncall pages be incorporated Etc.
- aprdm 2y agoNonsense were a lot of your replies in my experience :), this "measure everything" is very much another cargo cult. Software engineering is complex, people are complex, thinking you can come with a true metric and who doesn't have it doesn't know what they're doing is the nonsense in my world view. Have excited engineers, pay them well, have them work on something that is aligned with their career & deliver value to their customers, they don't really need much more than that. All the rest is simply trying to "processi-ze" what is a human
- klabb3 2y ago> You can't hire smart motivated people and then be surprised when they figure out to optimize for their rewards. Never said that. I don’t have a solution. Well I have a partial solution, but not complete: Reward all team members equally for the performance of the team, or even the company. For instance: the pie is divided into 3 pieces: company, team, and individual performance. Candy is given out based on performance of both. It doesn’t fix the hackable metrics issue, but when people collaborate the side effects are better than when they think of their own promotions, and worse when they’re competing against their direct peers for a fixed bucket of candy per team. Such incentives are directly opposing collaboration between the very people that need to collaborate the most.
- JustLurking2022 2y agoAt some point, the cargo cult are the promo reviewers and then the two become the same thing.
- Arainach 2y agoThe reviewers presumable have access to the true metrics.
- trelane 2y agoWhat if I told you these are their "true metrics?"
- Arainach 2y agoIf a company doesn't have consistent metrics for performance reviews uniformly across teams, get out of that company yesterday. That's just a hotbed of nepotism.
- lupire 2y agoPlease give an example of a metric for performance review for software engineering.
- Arainach 2y agoConceptual examples (not looking to argue about the specific bar): Senior engineers will: * Design a significant project which lands with measurable customer impact * Demonstrate expertise in at least one core skill outside of coding (test infrastructure, SRE, security, accessibility, etc.) * Demonstrate leadership by either being a TL, owning and leading team pillar efforts (security review, etc.), etc. * etc. Mid-level engineers will: * Own either a small feature end to end or a significant piece of a larger design * Contribute to at least one non-coding pillar * etc. These generally have more areas and can be further granular such as "low-performing midlevel is X, satisfactory is Y, exceeding is Z"
- racional 2y agoEither way -- 'twould seem that if such a level of microstrategizing is what monopolizes one's attention on a day-to-day basis -- then one is definitely in the wrong place.
- tdb7893 2y agoWhen I was at Google I mentored a lot of early career engineers and I always told them to write more docs than they think they need. Sometimes docs will catch problems beforehand but early in the career writing easy docs is a simple way to show independence and competence. It slows down projects but Google is probably gonna cancel that project anyway and my theory was "Google doesn't care about you so caring about it just makes you a chump". It was in most ways a great place to work but it slowly drove me insane.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoBut if they are going to cancel it anyway I would rather at least code and build just to have fun and at least have a prototype rather than doing the boring work. Also I feel like I can't get into right frame of mind of problem solving by writing a doc compared to if I am coding.
- rvnx 2y agoIf the project is anyway eventually going to be deprecated and shutdown, maybe it's better to take one of the Google bike and go round the campus drinking one of these tasty granitas from the cafeteria.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoIs there alcohol in it? If so, I would consider, but I would still take the alcohol and code the project as well.
- tdb7893 2y agoThe craziest thing to me is that at my location not that many people did the free workout classes. Between those classes and the food I was in the best shape of my life while working there. I steadily got in better shape as they kept cancelling the projects I worked on and I slowly lost and sort of will to care about my actual job. The quality of my work ended up suffering a lot as I realized just how pointless trying to work there was for me but the pay was too good to want to leave. Edit: I was unlucky though. I knew some people with more stable projects. I went through 4 cancelled projects in close to 6 years