Speaking as a >6 year veteran (Xoogler) some of this rings true. Still a couple of points:
> No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote.
This isn't quite true. It's true that the promo committee doesn't include your manager and it's that committee's vote that determines your promotion BUT your manager does get to say whether or not they support your promotion.
Anecdotally, committees expect to see manager support so if a potential promotee has it, it doesn't mean a lot unless there is a lot of specific information that the manager can provide to support the promotion (ideally peer feedback should do this anyway). It tends to be an issue if your manager doesn't support your promotion however. And this happens. It also happens that people get promoted without manager support.
Personally I never understood how this situation arose. I operate under the principle that there should never be "negative surprise". So if your manager doesn't support your promotion (which, hopefully, is solely because it's the manager's informed belief that it won't pass committee) then the report should already know this before they decide to submit for promotion. If they don't, that's a giant manager fail.
If the report goes up anyway, if I were a manager there's absolutely nothing to be gained from not supporting the promotion.
Moving on to the other points:
> Metrics or it didn’t happen
There's a lot of truth to it but not in the way the guy intends I think. He goes on to say that there were no metrics for what he was doing.
Well that's the first problem. You should create them. And it sounds like this guy was looking to a T4 to T5 promotion. There's a certain amount of independence and proactiveness required for T5+ so not creating the metrics to measure his successes by is an issue.
The manager again bears some responsibility for this. One of the primary jobs of a SWE manager (IMHO) is coaching their reports for situations like this and building their careers.
A better way to say this is that impact matters. Working on a bunch of small, unrelated things is not impact. Promotion isn't a matter of doing a lot of work or being helpfully necessarily. By T5+ it's an issue of having impact across your project and to your wider team.
Also, it's worth noting that often people do have to go up for the same promo twice. The natural instinct for committees is not to promote and they'll give you feedback as to why. So then 6 months down the track you submit an updated packet that includes all the ways you've addressed the previous committee's feedback. That's really common.
As for the holiday gift, yeah I was there for that. All I was say is that it was bad optics, particularly in light of say, how much money was handed out to Levandowski. The argument was that it was too expensive to adminster across so many different countries. This may be true but it feels like penny-pinching and cost-cutting. And as they say, as soon as they take away the free drinks it's time to pack your bags. The issue isn't the free drinks, it's what it signals.
Project cancellation! Been there twice. It's highly demotivating.