The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

Post by summerlight » Wed, May 04, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

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…

Post by avianlyric » Wed, May 04, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #79

arethuza wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a similar situation and seriously contemplated building an application to manage my status updates so I could enter the raw data once and have all N people who needed to be updated sent the right information in the right way at the right time....

This is a great idea!

Post by nickelcitymario » Wed, May 04, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #189

brokencode wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

I haven't worked at apple, but I suspect that this is the result of only having Some companies like to spam new products, others like to perfect what they have.

Post by Manuel_D » Wed, May 04, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #142

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…

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, doe…

Post by tuckerman » Wed, May 04, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #112

oofbey wrote: post #72

Earlier 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".