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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

#51

Post by mikepurvis »

llaolleh wrote: post #45

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…

That works in sales, where one salesperson runs the whole engagement and can clearly claim responsibility for the revenue and thus be directly compensated with a proportion of it.

But in engineering you need people to be thinking big picture, thinking collaboratively, taking risks, doing long term development, cleaning up technical debt. If you overly tie compensation to product revenue, you risk incentivizing your entire engineering staff toward short-term bolt-on-the-feature thinking.

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

#52

Post by burnoutgal »

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…

Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire.

A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking.

More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.

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

#53

Post by nonrandomstring »

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.

It is very instructive to read Deming and Weber.

Max Weber pretty much defined the modern conceit of bureaucracy. [1]

W.E Deming wrote extensively on the "American Disease". [2]

In a few words management and measurement are both inescapable beyond a certain organisational size, and they are the problem, because in almost all scenarios they will expand to displace/strangle the actual work.

It is a recognised general structural problem in systems.

Of course there is much more to it than the above simplification which may sound like an extreme philosophy - but I have yet to encounter good refutations or counterexamples to this tendency.

The answer, perhaps, is that small and many is beautiful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

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

#54

Post by ahtihn »

water-your-self wrote: post #24
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.

Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.

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

#55

Post by meowtimemania »

UncleMeat wrote: post #30
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…

I think there just aren’t enough reasonably solvable hard problems. All the low hanging fruit is taken, and the result is artificially complex solutions as a way for engineers to demonstrate craftsmanship.

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

#56

Post by fdgsdfogijq »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #13
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #4

Most 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

Not really? Promos incentive "up and out" culture, where people switch teams after getting promoted. Machiavellian managers respond by not promoting their best people, instead forever dangling the carrot of "deliver this and get promoted next cycle!".

100%, have worked at two FAANGs and this is what I have seen. Complex business knowledge leads to promotions

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

#57

Post by burnoutgal »

MattGaiser wrote: post #42
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.

In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.

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

#58

Post by burnoutgal »

ahtihn wrote: post #54
water-your-self wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.

But you need a house with a backyard, two teslas, a wine cellar and a college fund or you aren't really living /s

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

#59

Post by mochomocha »

xoofoog wrote: post #43

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 US…

A friend of mine didn't get a promotion at Google because he was told that though his work generated >1B of revenues for the company, it was not "hard enough". He left the company.

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

#60

Post by meowtimemania »

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…

If you aspire to be a homeowner, 200k in the Bay Area will be difficult.
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