So, if you have a company that depends on uptime, then pay the people doing the maintenance programming / sysadmin twice as much as the normal developers since they don't get to play with the new thing, they are much more likely to have to deal with things at odd hours, and need to be promoted based on keeping the business running.
The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
61–70 of 613 posts
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#62The 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 whole point of a tech company is to pay engineers $X and find a way for them to create some over-unity multiple of $X in value.
If the problem is “this incentivizes engineers to make each other deliver more value”, that sounds like not a problem (and opens everyone up for increasing $X).
It’s a problem when you start to see your fellow employees as the competition instead of your actual competitors being the competition.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#63This 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…
A co-worker of mine described this as 'surfing ahead of the wave of responsibility'
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#64Seriously, 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.
As of 2022, it's now difficult anywhere in most US metropolitan areas.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#65Earlier 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.
In San Francisco, the median household income was $120k. That’s 2 years ago mind you, and a lot of inflation has occurred since then.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#66It 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, th…
Isn't the 20% time to work on whatever cool shit you want enough ? (like how googlers created that garbage angular1 because they were border, have no clue about GUIs and had some fun scewing around ) ? I know people that are fine with getting paid to maintain shit so maybe the problem is Google only hires cool developers and the cool developers only want to work on cool stuff and in 2 years the newest cool stuff of-course.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#67When 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 s…
Thanks for the recommendation. I am a big fan of Weber, not familiar with Deming but his work sounds very relevant. In general I tend to agree that beyond a certain size organization these problems seem unavoidable. I've read Systemantics/The Systems Bible and it seems to come to a similar conclusion.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#68It 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, th…
There is that too, but you could solve that by having engineers/teams working in new, cool, and useful products. I feel my company doesn't have a good mechanism to maintain services that aren't actively developed.
We experience it first hand when one of our services got deprecated and we moved to a new org. The solution was literally to hire a new team in a low CoL country and hand over the service to them. Needless to say it was difficult to hire for those positions.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#69The 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
Seems like if your boss is a receptacle for status updates, the company is doing management wrong. Sure, it works less bad with one, but that doesn't mean it's good.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#70When I was at Google this was a huge problem.
I worked on features/products that could be built and supported by small teams. Once those projects were ‘done’, those same teams inevitably turned to unnecessary rewrites, expansions and redesigns. And they all got promoted for it. For turning a 5-person project into a 25 person project that did the same thing, but with more moving pieces.
Because you can’t usually reach L6 by maintaining a project, no matter how impactful.