111–120 of 613 posts
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…
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…
Another example of this is their OKR system. If you meet all your quarterly goals at Google, that's not a success. In fact, you're frowned upon for not setting your goals high enough. Their whole management process encourages people to chase after impossible goals, and literally discourages people from getting things done.
Incentives make people do the weirdest stuff. It becomes pure politics at a certain point and largely a cool kids club of who you know to sponsor you and being generally well-liked. I'm not going to kiss ass for a title. I'm going to demonstrate I earned it the hard way. While most companies don't recognize that path as much anymore, it's not very hard to get the title at another company.
The people who bring the most value to each team are often the unsung heroes who don't get promoted fast either. Good leaders will take notice however.
The book "Staff Engineer" by Will Larson has some good bits on this topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d rather work twice as many hours per year for half as many years. It’s not that one choice is obviously dominant over the other across all people.
Yes, given "getting hit by a bus" is a probabilistic event that is independent of my working hours, I would rather make 2x for half as many years, all other things being equal. I'd also rather make 3x for a third as many years, and so on, if it were possible. Given time value of money and compounding interest, it's always better to front load your working time and make Nx for 1/N as much calendar time worked. And for…
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
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve openly stated that I want my retirement job to be an SWE3-ish role somewhere. High enough to have interesting, somewhat challenging work, but with negative desire to climb the ranks any further.
Problem with that is due to inflation, you're making less and less compensation every year. Standard "you're doing a good job" raises often do not meet inflation, and certainly are not right now where inflation is higher than the recent historical mean. This is not a problem for some people, maybe including you, but I think most people have a general vague career expectation of making more when they're 60 than they m…
At that point, financial arrangements are presumably already all set.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem? Should someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug? I've seen real bugs that bounce around for months, each time to someone who looks decides it isn't in their code and points to someone else: eventually we tell one engineer to solve it…
This all sounds nice but it's missing the concrete details and that's the most important part. "Build into core values wanting to create a culture where the end-user is the priority, not individual advancement up the ladder" Is there any non-exploitative way to interpret this? The only thing worse than wasting my time on features for promo rather than users is working overtime to make more money for those with signif…
This passage specifically:
> For as long as possible, make the success of the company the primary motivator, rather than promo
How do you simply make the success of the company the primary motivator? IMO, you either try real hard to pay/promote them based on the success of the company, which feeds into the promo culture problem, or you find people to work towards the company's success without explicit promises of rewards, maybe by alluding to potential rewards you may/may-not give them (aka maybe exploiting them).
One alternative is you can find people who are satisfied with their place in life, and willing to just crank out work regularly without promises of increased rewards. IME, people like that AND skilled enough are very rare. It would be very hard to build a company of solely those people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
When I was at Facebook, this was administered by using the next level review guidelines after you had a position for N months (depends on the position), and if you don't meet those expectations, putting you into the firing pipeline (PIP, etc). One of many reasons I was happier when I stopped having people reporting to me.