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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

#41

Post by oicU00 »

mirntyfirty wrote: post #33
angarg12 wrote: post #16

It 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.

They have to show on investor calls the line went up.

We’re propping up the wealth of a generation that has no idea how anything works, but they got there first so of course they are now the de facto deciders of our agency.

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

#42

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

You are counting on that job to always be there for one thing.

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

#43

Post by xoofoog »

Former Googler here. This person has correctly identified that a key reason why google sucks is that people very often...

> choose between doing what’s best for users or what’s best for their career

But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.

Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an existing system was somehow on par with building a new system (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something perfectly good). The googler would say "well those useful problems are too easy to merit a promotion. Anybody can solve easy problems - we're google, and we're too smart to work on those easy problems." Grow up.

Y'all value the wrong things. That's why your culture is broken.

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

#44

Post by ylou »

shadowgovt wrote: post #23
chestervonwinch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, r…

No good deed goes unpunished. No decent coworker goes unexploited.

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

#45

Post by llaolleh »

My take on these BigCos is that there is so much middle management and hierarchy that the frontline workers are blocked from the actual performance of the company.

My proposed fix is entire product groups and their members should be held accountable and directly take profit of what they earn. If the product does well that quarter, engineers should be rewarded. Something to keep them working on a great product rather than catastrophically forgetting.

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

#46

Post by ZainRiz »

angarg12 wrote: post #16

It 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…

The problem is a bit more insidious than that

As an engineer, you want to be working on cool new features too! Very few folks will be content sitting on their laurels just fixing the occasional bug or adding a touch more polish to a product that's already "done"

If you setup a team to work that way, very soon you'll find that most of your engineers have left. Heck, the manager might get bored and leave too.

"Okay, that's fine," you might think "The product is still doing alright even without an owner. Higher level leadership should be fine with that"

Until the day comes when the service crashes unexpectedly, and you realize that no one left on the engineering team has enough context to debug the issue properly

Hello two week long outage

Examples: Heroku - https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1520770263977271296 Atlassian - https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1513605414029516806

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

#47

Post by dub »

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…

Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what have you done for me lately?" mindset.

If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything exciting lately, middle management might become less interested in whether the service is running well and more interested in having "career" conversations about how your role description says you're supposed to be launching cross-functional projects more frequently.

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

#48

Post by geodel »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #28
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 wo…

In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.

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

#49

Post by WithinReason »

angarg12 wrote: post #16

It 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…

This sounds like Eric Weinstein's Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO) concept. Notably also occurs in academia and economics.

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

#50

Post by HWR_14 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #34
angarg12 wrote: post #16

It 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?

It would be a smart business decision. A Google mid-tier employee or two just isn't a large cost to keep a project running. It's not cheap, sure, but to have a product running at scale?
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