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The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

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Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#21

Post by kodah »

There's just a lack of ability to own a product as an engineer. Those things are delegated to managers and product owners; lead engineers are really just there to align work - not really to make broad vision beyond suggestions.

If engineering firms wanted to improve they'd ensure that everyone who has decision making power over a product, whether from a business or technical perspective, is at the same level and has the same input. That way refactor is weighed the same as a new feature or service.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#22

Post by billsmithaustin »

At my previous employer, every quarter we were supposed to update an elaborate spreadsheet describing how we measured up against the numerous criteria for the next level on the career ladder. I hated it.

That said, there were lots of people who obsessed over the process, looking for shortcuts or ways to game the system.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#23

Post by shadowgovt »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #19
baby wrote: post #2

The 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.…

> The 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. Raising up and increasing the productivity of your peers sounds like a good thing. I think I'm missing how this is a bad outcome due to a perverse incentive. Are you saying the value extrac…

Your peers are rewarded for accomplishing their goals. In the best-case scenario, the incentive is to find ways to synergize your goals so you are all benefitting.

In the common-case scenario, you figure out how to bribe / cajole / coerce them into putting time in on your project and don't really care about how things are going on their project, because we're all responsible engineers who can time-manage ourselves, right? So you get your promotion and they get screwed because the work they did to deliver on something valuable to the company isn't reflected in their OKRs.

It degenerates what should be a collective goal of accomplishing the company's objectives the best way possible into a slotting game of making sure you're always listed on paper as being on the right project, because your work won't have value if you applied it outside your bullpen.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#24

Post by water-your-self »

burnoutgal wrote: post #20

Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast? There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a ton of work for no benefit. I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely b…

Try having a family as a sole earner on 200k in the bay area. Or new york.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#25

Post by sna1l »

I think the problem with the promotion culture is that you can't demote someone after they've been promoted. If you just focus on showing impact and cross team projects, your engineers will naturally build more complex projects than needed to hit those targets. The key is to track the long term maintainability and quality of the systems built. E.g. time to land diffs, incidents, performance metrics, etc. If a system starts to quickly fail these things or don't last then it is a pretty good sign that the project wasn't actually built well. Things aren't always under a single person's control but a lot of people will work on a big complex (seemingly good) project and then bounce after they've gotten their promo.

I do think there is a balance though because at a lot of startups the incentive is to just crank out a lot of product code but not really think about multiplier type work.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#26

Post by MattGaiser »

goolulusaurs wrote: post #3

When 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.

There would need to be something big to override individual interest.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#27

Post by shadowgovt »

burnoutgal wrote: post #20

Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast? There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a ton of work for no benefit. I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely b…

At Google specifically, even being promoted to staff is a huge undertaking. And until recently, there was an expectation of forward career trajectory built into the lower ranks, i.e. every engineer was functionally multi-year probationary. If you found something valuable to do but you weren't progressing your career (because, say, the work was necessary but boring, like micro-optimizations, feature polish on a mature product, or documentation / example creation), you'd start to have talks with your manager about your future at the company.

I believe they relaxed that process when someone at the top took a look at their org-chart and realized they've become a big company where they need a critical mass of not-actually-interested-in-progressing engineers to keep the lights on and if they actually followed their policy, they risked churning those reliable workhorses out of the company because they couldn't actually afford to find a slot to promote them all.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#28

Post by Hermitian909 »

burnoutgal wrote: post #20

Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast? There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a ton of work for no benefit. I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely b…

Off the top of my head:

1. More money means less time till I hit FU money and can choose work without any consideration of pay

2. 200k/yr is not as much as it seems if you're in the bay area and have kids

3. Bigger title -> more input on core design decisions. Hate some idea coming from the higher ups? You're in a position to do something about it.

4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#30

Post by UncleMeat »

leros wrote: post #5

I 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)…

> 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)

Ideally this gets people fired, not promoted. Google explicitly calls out "solutions to hard problems are easy to maintain" on its ladder, for example. People can fail to identify these cases, but the intention is to promote based on hard problems rather than complex solutions.

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