Another issue is that "promotion" can mean any number of things which someone may desire or not care about. This "promotion" may mean a private office, more flexibility with your time, more money, respect, control over what you work on, meetings with higher-ups, direct reports, and so forth. Not everyone wants all of these things in a single bundle.
The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
141–150 of 613 posts
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#142Former 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…
So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the same system for years? When do you stop promoting them? There's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine. Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, does he get promoted again? Once? Twice? Does he become a principal engineer, for adequately maintaining his corner of the world?
The person who is really good and really effective at fixing user issues, first of all can't scale past a certain point, but second of all, likely doesn't have the the experience to design and shepherd the data storage system that also manages permissions across nested groups efficiently (one of these is what we'd expect of a solid L4, the other is https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/).
You're asking for title inflation. Is that really what you want? What you really want is a different role, "maintenance eng" who can get paid more for doing the same work they were doing yesterday, and who needs to reinterview for SWE roles, because its very quickly obvious that a principal maintenance eng and a principal eng do very different things!
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#143My 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.
I've experienced managers pressuring me to either go for promo or find a different team.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#144There sure is a thriving subculture of telling people how to not repeat the "mistakes" of an 1800-billion-dollar organization.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Holy shit. Sounds like my company.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah from what I've heard you ideally want to hit 70-80% of your OKRs, and people game it to make sure they fail at one or two so they don't get accused of being "too easy".
One of the most hilarious things I've ever seen was the head of Google Plus loudly sharing his "1.0 OKR" regarding social adoption at TGIF. It was about that time folks got suspicious and some long-termers found out Vic was lying about adoption rates.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
True, it’s difficult to know how things work when they become needlessly complicated and one is unable to move on from a project that is essentially complete.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#148Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#149Former 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 Re…
I think Apple has done a fantastic job of incremental improvements on their products rather than chasing the next cool thing. Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better?
For instance, they often resist new technologies like high refresh rate or OLED screens, 5G, etc., until they feel the technology is developed sufficiently and won’t impact battery life. There are other brands that compete by making a list of features rather than a coherent product.
Of the examples you named, both the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard are gone now, and the latest Macs are the best Macs ever. That shows a willingness to try new things, while also showing that they have good judgement in the long term and a willingness to move away from what doesn’t work.
Also, the iPad and Apple Watch haven’t been as important to Apple as the iPhone, but they are still original and category-defining products that I would call innovative. Not every new product needs to double your company’s market cap to be a big success in the category.
Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Missing OKRs always seemed a little weird to me. It strikes me as a lack of vision and makes the numbers and goals chosen seem very arbitrary.
Missing OKRs means that the team cannot set achievable goals. It is a signal that the team has terrible foresight.
I know the argument is that by being more ambitious and achieving 70%, you are setting ambitious goals. But then the goals are never met. The work doesn't finish. The projects falter. The users are unhappy. Engineers leave.