My experience has been that some companies pressure engineers to want to advance. If you come into a performance review and say "actually I'm happy where I am" it's seen as a lack of motivation and will count as a mark against you. I had a boss say to me "I always want to move to the next level and I expect the same of my reports". Whatever, I guess I'm a poor employee because I like my job.
The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
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Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#32The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable. All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires? In order to reduce time spent on perf, you'd have to rely on a few people who knows an employee's work instead of a larger peer group and committee. The per…
i remember reading in some startup oriented text that founder driven values works up to about 50 people. once your company grows beyond that a culture shift is inevitable.
i don't know what the answers are to manage that shift and avoid it going into the wrong direction.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#33It gets worse than promo-driven development. Recently we had a chat with a lead from another team. Their product has a lot of similarities with ours so we sync up every now and then to bounce ideas off each other. They recently release a big change that we thought didn't provide much value, so we asked him about it. His candid answer was "you know how it works, we have a service running in production, so we need to m…
I think this is one of the key frustrations I have with modern software development, change for the sake of change. I feel as though many products degrade over time and as a user I’m generally quite hesitant to upgrade anything if I don’t have to.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#34It gets worse than promo-driven development. Recently we had a chat with a lead from another team. Their product has a lot of similarities with ours so we sync up every now and then to bounce ideas off each other. They recently release a big change that we thought didn't provide much value, so we asked him about it. His candid answer was "you know how it works, we have a service running in production, so we need to m…
Arguably one of the causes of this is high salaries and only hiring (supposedly, I have no personal experience) Very Smart Developers. You're going to pay Google salaries for someone just to keep the lights on?
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#35> and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well.
I can honestly say I didn't care about promotion while I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft (as a Software Engineer II). The quoted assertion makes me wonder if I was being naive or lazy. I truly believed that I didn't need to care about promotion because the work I was doing was worthwhile for its own sake, i.e. I cared about the product and the users. In retrospect, maybe I didn't make the most of the opportunity I had there; I suppose I could have had more impact if I had leveled up. But I wasn't thinking that way at the time.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#36This is only sort-of related, but a while back there was a beautiful Twitter thread, I think about Google product managers or engineering leaders, who come into a product, revamp a bunch of features and come up with metrics to show that they were successful with it in the short term, and then use that as the case for their promotion and time it just right so they can disengage and bail over to the next product, just before all of the short-term decisions they made blew up and hurt the original product. The punchline of the tweet thread was that they move on to the next product - and the final tweet in the thread looped back to the first tweet in the thread.
Does anyone remember this thread?
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#37Most 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
This is very common! What's worse is these engineers likely created or at least contributed to a situation where tribal knowledge is valuable, rather than developing simple decoupled systems that can be picked up by new engineers.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#38This is only sort-of related, but a while back there was a beautiful Twitter thread, I think about Google product managers or engineering leaders, who come into a product, revamp a bunch of features and come up with metrics to show that they were successful with it in the short term, and then use that as the case for their promotion and time it just right so they can disengage and bail over to the next product, just…
That is hilarious. It's a real life example of catastrophic forgetting.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#39Seriously, 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…
My main motivation for work at this point is to provide for my children and buy my retirement. More money via promotion helps me achieve those goals.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#40When 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.
Historically this was achieved via religion. Small-to-medium size startups can sometimes pull it off with the concept of a "mission", although that's probably less effective these days since everyone wants to "change the world". I think someone would have to be pretty naive to have a similar level of belief in the mission of a multinational corporation. Or they're high enough in the org chart that they don't have to worry about anything else.