The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
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Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#2The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC.
The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion. Everybody becomes "fake friend".
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#3When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent to which they pervade practically every human institution.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#4Most promotions I've seen are when someone has a huge amount of tribal knowledge about some system and the company cannot afford to have them leave. So they get promoted. This is even within FAANG, where this narrative about impact or 10x developers is common. Not saying promotions dont happen for those reasons, just that huge systems that few people understand lead to promotions for those who do understand them
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#5I used to manage engineers at another large tech company and this was a big problem. There was nowhere near enough big projects to get everyone the evidence they needed for promotions.
As a result we ended up doing two things a lot:
1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of services that could have just been a feature in an existing service)
2) de-prioritizing important things that were small in order to ensure everyone had a big project every quarter.
We ended up having to hire contractors to work on the small stuff because it was piling up and causing problems.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#6The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…
Were strict hierarchies really that bad?
It seems that just about anything else devolves into an ontological mess of Byzantine proportions. At one stage in my career I was reporting to 4 different bosses in this weird interleaved hypercube topology. I spent most of my time giving status updates
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#7The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…
Were strict hierarchies really that bad? It seems that just about anything else devolves into an ontological mess of Byzantine proportions. At one stage in my career I was reporting to 4 different bosses in this weird interleaved hypercube topology. I spent most of my time giving status updates
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Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#8This all sounds nice but it's missing the concrete details and that's the most important part.
"Build into core values wanting to create a culture where the end-user is the priority, not individual advancement up the ladder"
Is there any non-exploitative way to interpret this? The only thing worse than wasting my time on features for promo rather than users is working overtime to make more money for those with significant equity/ownership in ways that will never seriously affect my comp. Without promo or "promo by a different name" i.e. money, how do you incentivize people? How do you decide who to allocate your finite equity and money to?
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#9The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…
Phwewww... this blog post and all these comments ring so true to me way outside of contexts resembling software development or business that it seems to me it's getting at something very fundamental.
A corollary to this in my opinion is that if promotion is expected at some point, I think the business/organization/institution has a responsibility to try to facilitate people moving toward that through mentoring or at least clear expectations. If nothing else, it makes the expectations clear, which clarifies how those might be at odds with other goals such as what the blog poster is articulating.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#10In other words, "hire people who want to work hard for the founders at the expense of their self-promotion".