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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

#121

Post by xmprt »

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…

It's all about how you twist it. If you say "I built 2 new services that could have just been a feature in an existing service" then you'll probably get a bad review.

However, if you give a reason for building the 2 new services (eg. more extensibility, enables a new flow, easier to use for other teams) then all of a sudden the complexity is justified and you'll appear to have solved a hard problem. No one is going to look super deeply and ask if those reasons are valid and if you even need the extra extensibility or if other teams will use the service.

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

#122

Post by Veuxdo »

xoofoog wrote: post #107
klipt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty sexist to associate solving hard problems with masculinity. Women at Google also work on hard problems.

The sexist part is not the "hard problems" but the competitiveness. I don't think sexism is intrinsic to solving hard problems - certainly gender-inclusive companies work on hard problems successfully. But in my experience those companies tend to be more collaborative. Google needs to celebrate heroes. Like Jeff Dean. Or Sanjay Ghemawat. Those are Great Men. They are "Living Gods" because they solved Really Hard Prob…

I'm don't see the connection between what you wrote and masculinity.

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

#123

Post by sytelus »

Promo-culture cannot be ignored because with each level, your total compensation often increases by 50-100% at many big tech. You can absolutely expect people to alter their actions to whatever promo-culture demands. As the article says, one answer is to simply align the incentives which is to make promos based on customer satiesfaction and adoption. The issue is this: when you release new product, your adoption/satiesfaction/revenue increases infinitely because denominator is zero. Often media blitz follows which raises the profiles of small team and increasing their market value than usual bug fixer. The new learning experiences of new-product teams and ability to do aggresive hustle on impossible schedules also adds into their market value relative to Joe, the minor feature developer. These people become important because one of the growth criteria for big tech is ability to diversity, aka, release new products and excite the hopeful investors. So companies are forced to associate product releases with promos. Current promo-culture at big tech is not a bug but a feature. I think very few understand this dynamics.

There is one extremely bad aspect of promo-culture not discussed in the article: Many promos in higher level have requirement that the person must become the people manager. The idea is that at certain pay level you must be able to "scale" you impact by directing others as opposed to doing things by yourself. In tech, this is extraordinarily flawed idea. Scale can be achieved by being manager but also by being individual contributor. People like Jeff Dean has contributed far more as IC than probably most VPs at Google. I don't know how many brilliant technical ICs have killed themselves by trying to be people manager to get that alluring promo.

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

#124

Post by throwaway_1928 »

ryandrake wrote: post #96
sokoloff wrote: post #73

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…

You can always move to the same level in a different company to readjust your pay.

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

#125

Post by lisper »

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…

Another former Googler here (from waaaaaaayyyy back -- I was employee #104).

The reason Google is the way it is, and many organizations are the way they are, is that they are trying to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success. Google initially succeeded by solving what was at the time a Really Hard Problem, and so the people at the top want to reproduce that by encouraging people to solve more Really Hard Problems. Apple has fallen into the exact same trap. Their initial success came from building a Cool New Thing, and so they are constantly trying to build the next Cool New Thing. The problem is that at some point the product has actually converged to a local design maximum and so making further changes to it in order to produce something New and Cool is not actually an improvement.

But it doesn't work because it's sn inductive fallacy. Just because solving a Really Hard Problem or making a Cool New Thing led to success once does not mean that doing these things will lead to success in general. But the memory of that initial success is really hard to get past, especially when it was as earth-shattering as the initial Google search engine, or the Mac or the iPhone.

(Apple has actually done better than most companies at reproducing their initial success. They've done it at least five times, with the Apple II, the Mac, OSX, the iPod and the iPhone. But then there is the touch bar, the butterfly keyboard, the flat look...)

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

#126

Post by happimess »

ryandrake wrote: post #102
sokoloff wrote: post #78

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…

I think it's insane to, for example, work at an office early in your 20s, to put a couple grand in your 401(k). Those 1-2 years, if spent exploring, could mean finding a happier and more thoughtful way to progress through the latter 70% of your life.

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

#128

Post by xmprt »

joshuamorton wrote: post #117
bluGill wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, this wouldn't get someone promoted, because it doesn't actually solve the problem. The problem here is that the triage process is a mess. Fixing that, so that bugs don't bounce around for months, would probably get someone promoted, or at least be a significant factor.

What if the solution to that hard problem is improving the incentive structure and paying/promoting people for fixing bugs? That's something only ELT or SVPs can do and they aren't getting promoted for that.

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

#129

Post by mathattack »

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…

What’s more import for Senior leaders to do - solve hard problems or useful ones? If it’s the former they’re doing the right thing. If it’s the latter that explains a lot of their deprecation issues.

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

#130

Post by xoofoog »

cvhashim wrote: post #103
xoofoog wrote: post #82

Quoted post unavailable.

Erm that’s not true at all.

Okay, Googler, how about some data to back up that assertion? Let's have a googley-argument where we're respectful in showing that we're smarter than the person we're putting down.

Here's my data. Google values consensus - fact. This "wisdom of the crowds" philosophy was core to founding google - Larry & Sergey's brilliant insight that the collective votes of hyperlinks was a stronger signal than things like H1 tags and HTML titles in picking good search results.

But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody needs to agree on the right thing to do. Problem is in reality people don't always agree. So what happens when the group needs to reach consensus but people disagree? Since Google doesn't have a respectful way to disagree, the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized - either pushed out of the group or proven to be not smart enough for their opinions to be valid.

God I hate myself while I'm writing this. I left for a reason.

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