The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

At some point I realized I'm quite bad at engineering skills as well as politics skills required to be promoted at big companies, resulting in significant slower promotions than most people in the company.

After some years, I realized I'm better at the game of pretending to care, and put less effort and hours while still being paid 100% of compensation. Even more so thanks to remote work with covid. Now I find gratification in projects outside of work with this time.

Note that both strategies (getting promoted vs just working less time) increase your pay/hour, so just do whatever you're best at.

My current project is confidential, but one from 2013-2014:

We had a bunch of UXR that showed that people liked iPhones because of the fancy snappy animations, and our execs really wanted to bring that to Google's webapps. At the time, there was this big perception that mobile web sites were slow and clunky and you absolutely had to go native app to get smooth 60fps transitions. I did some profiling with the Chrome profiler and found that the bulk of time was spent in layout & reflow, and that one single reflow would blow your entire frame budget and then some for 60fps on mobile. So then I went to the Chrome GPU team and got a quick tutorial about exactly which operations were handled on the GPU (basically just transform and WebGL, at the time), and put together a visual language that basically involved rendering portions of the webpage to GPU textures and manipulating them only with 2D transforms, which could be GPU-accelerated. The work later formed the foundation for how Material Design was implemented in Search.

As a side note, I learned a lot about how browsers work under the hood with that project, and one of the things I learned is that the entire premise that React was sold with was false! At the time, the big selling point with React is that "DOM manipulation is slow, so we create a virtual DOM that's fast and then diff the changes to the virtual DOM so we make only the minimal set of DOM changes we need." Except that every major browser by 2013 used a dirty-bit system for DOM manipulation, so changes to the DOM are actually quite fast (roughly the speed of a couple pointer manipulations in C) as long as you don't trigger reflow. And you can trigger reflow with any one of about 2 dozen method calls, as well as automatically when you return from a Javascript script fragment, so basically every Angular and JQuery website was triggering multiple reflows per event. React was fast because it was declarative and didn't let you execute user code until it was done batching up all DOM manipulations, it wasn't fast because of the virtual DOM. And I believe there have been re-implementations of the React API that do away with the virtual DOM and they are equally fast (oftentimes even faster, since they're simpler and don't need the DOM diffing), but at this point React is popular because it's popular and everyone knows the API, not because of any purported performance benefits.

I am currently learning that platform work in most places means nothing if you cannot point at an actual metric that management at appropriate level cares about, changing in a very tangible way; or unless your users are your peers, and you can be so good/promote yourself so well that your sheer reputation helps (and I'm not sure the latter even works in most places).

I've actually previously worked at a platform team for a ton of internal customers, and then at a B2B startup selling platforms - that's where you get promoted for platform development, cause platform is the product and reducing request latency or whatever is something VPs care about... in my current team I have a long list of impactful (on platform level) improvements I could make to infrastructure and libraries, engineering fundamentals, etc... that I'm not doing, cause I'm doing some boring work that will move some number, or sitting in meetings with 3 teams trying to get out a feature, that customers (or management) care about for some strange reason ;) E.g. perf work only matters when we want to save on server budget, and we have to decide to save on it beforehand, and it still doesn't matter as much as shipping some new widget or a metric change. Or e.g. I created a library for X that ended up being used by a bunch of people in a few teams (not the original goal). I am pretty sure nobody above IC level cares. All I get for that are occasional bug reports and a perception that I might be an expert at X... if the library doesn't contribute to my career via the latter, there's no other way it will :)

> If someone wrote such a proposal…

So, in this scenario:

* hiring manager tells the candidate they’ll get a “quick promotion”, but only if they “don’t suck”.

* candidate responds with proposed clarifications of “speedy” and “suck”.

* hiring manager drops candidate from consideration.

Did I get this right?

> And I'm highly skeptical a company will agree to a milestones-rewards plan for an individual employee.

And yet hiring managers play fast and loose with employee expectations all the time, even if their company would never honor such promises as a matter of policy.

How would you propose a candidate determine whether the hiring manager is making promises in good faith?

There ARE formal definitions of positions, title/rank, and requirements for experience and education, (as well as pay range) defined by the US Federal Government's Office of Personnel Management. These are used for determining staffing requirements in government contracting and hiring.

Most mature government contracting companies follow these standards.

In private industry, though - it's like Lord of the Flies. As far as I've seen.