Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, just to make sure we are on the same page, are you in agreement that this wasn't politics, but perhaps a disagreement in the roles and responsibilities of a manager and an engineer and what an engineer is expected to do at google? I just want to make sure we're on the same page on that, which was the crux of my point. But as to your point, on the roles and responsibilities of managers and engineers, I mostly a…
> shipping projects on time, and under budget, especially when they are large in scope and involve complex technologies or large teams that you've led, and especially when those projects have impact on the company's bottom line, those project are considered major impact and and those engineers are amply rewarded Wasn't the point of the article that the Grunt work that has to be done and makes things better for everyo…
You make an interesting point, and I'd like to suggest an alternative lens to view it from, as a thought experiment. Let's say company X values work that benefits company X, and that's why they hired you and pay your salary. You've given two examples of promotion rationale, one in which you clearly and objectively demonstrated the impact of the work. And the other, speculative, as you say. Now speculative implies not necessarily real -- it's possible that your guess about how much it will probably save could turn out to be wrong. If you don't have a way to measure this, how do you know that it's the case? It feels good to refactor the code, but just consider for a moment the possibility that you could travel through time and see the future results of current behavior. What if you fast-forward and discover that refactoring that code had no benefit? Now return to the current time: is it actually worth doing? If you're spending time refactoring that code at the expense of developing the feature? Maybe this is why company X prefers to promote people based on actual impact rather than speculation.
Perhaps another solution here is to look for ways to measure the impact of that refactoring. Surely your bugs go through some kind of bug tracker, and you would be able to count the before and the after? Is there no line on no graph anywhere that shows an improvement attributable to the refactoring? Can peers at least speak to how crappy the code was before and how much easier it is to work with now? Perhaps the new employee got up to speed in record time because of it? If, at the end of the day, there's absolutely no way to show that this work was valuable, then perhaps... and here's the part we don't like to think about as engineers... perhaps it wasn't all that valuable. Here's the part we like to think about even worse: you could spend 6 months of your career working really hard on something that turns out to be a dud. And it may be entirely rational that you don't get a promotion on the back of that work.
I'm not saying this is how Google works, or describing any particular situation, but I find it valuable to consider different points of view.