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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

#201

Post by tfp137 »

sytelus wrote: post #155
xoofoog wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Proving that you can lead does not neccesarily mean that you must prove others cannot lead. This is the fundamental problem in your thinking when you make such generic and universal claims. If people are doing this (and I do believe it happens a lot), then it is certainly very toxic culture but calling it "toxic masculinity" is forcing the issues into your own sexist ideologies. Also, competitiveness is not by defaul…

Whether or not it's "toxic masculinity", the internal lingo around performance reviews at Google is lulzy.

It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"

It's offensive and backward, but it's also hilarious that grown men (and women, if they ever get let in to executive circles) are using language that sounds like it was invented by teenagers.

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

#202

Post by sytelus »

analyst74 wrote: post #17

The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable. All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires? In order to reduce time spent on perf, you'd have to rely on a few people who knows an employee's work instead of a larger peer group and committee. The per…

The deeper issue you are pointing out is that only early employees get to capture the majority of the value while late employees only get the bread-crumbs. So everyone wants to be "early employee" of new products. In a way, this is inherent problem with capitalism where the idea is that if you have the capital, you pay the workers generating your capital only through return on capital as opposed to part of the capital. This way you can grow your networth exponentially in capitalistic system as long as you can begin with sufficient initial capital somehow. Anyone without such capital must live on month-to-month or year-to-year wages generated by the return-on-capital.

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

#203

Post by Manuel_D »

ahtihn wrote: post #54
water-your-self wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

I'm going to guess that software developers, especially ones at FAANG, aren't aiming for a median household lifestyle. 200k post tax is easily ~140k a year. A san francisco mortgage is easily 4-5k a month for 30 years. And if their kids don't get lucky on the school lottery, they're going to be sending them to private school. And then there's college savings to account for.

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

#204

Post by blobbers »

YES!

I worked at a start-up that was later acquired by a mega corp. When it was a start-up, it felt like we were focused on growing the pie. Once we were acquired, everyone just wanted a bigger slice for themselves.

I also felt like we had a ton of terrible presentations, and it felt like a braggy culture whereby you had to promote the work you did and make it seem more important. The reality was we all knew who the good engineers were and who the bad ones were. It was just annoying to have to listen to people talk about a widget they'd built that tbh nobody really cared about.

I worked with people to make their talks less about promotion and more about education; that at least made the presentations bearable and engineers felt like they might have learned something from them. Eventually though I realized I didn't want to be in that sort of culture and joined a smaller company.

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

#205

Post by jedberg »

tuckerman wrote: post #199
jedberg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I've never seen or even heard of anyone throwing their OKRs to avoid the appearance that they were too easy. In fact, you rarely hear about another team's grading of OKRs at all. Plenty of teams inside Google also set OKRs expecting/hoping to hit 1.0 so it wouldn't be at all surprising to see lots of 1's/near 1's on teams.

Well this was told to me by xooglers who were now working for other companies, so either they were the ones doing it and that's why they left, or they made it up to make Google sound worse. So I guess take it with a grain of salt?

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

#206

Post by lordnacho »

sytelus wrote: post #165
joshuamorton wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If a person is locked up in one feature/one product and unwilling to learn new things for the years then I do not think that person should be promoted. You can certainly give merit increases to keep up with inflation but that's about that. Ultimately, we all responding to market value of a person. That value remains unchanged for someone not learning anything new for years after the earned experience saturates. In ma…

But the person might have the knowledge to build on whatever the system is, without having the mandate to do so. He'd still be the best person to modify the system, but for whatever reason the business doesn't need the edits. Should you keep him happy just in case or let him find another job and take the option to upgrade with him?

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

#208

Post by tfp137 »

angarg12 wrote: post #16

It 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…

> If you have a team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is not enough to keep the lights on or slowly polish the product, you need grand roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or two. Ideally you want to justify that you need extra headcount to keep the product expanding.

This. It generates the Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber talked about. As a middle manager or tech lead (Taskmaster) you hire people (Flunkies) to make yourself seem more important as well as for roles (Box Ticker) that you might not need but that any "important" project will retain. In the end, this generates duplicate effort and needless work that requires fixing (Duct-Tapers). The only one of the five Graeber categories not represented is the Goon, and that's because those get moved to MTV and fast tracked to the executive suite.

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

#209

Post by lordnacho »

MivLives wrote: post #139
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of this is due to companies shooting themselves in the foot over and over, recruiting developers looking for challenges rather than grunt developers okay doing largely maintenance for a solid income. If they advocate themselves as providing the challenges for the former and filter out the latter, yes, obviously your employees are going to leave after they have to move that one div by 5 pixels for the umpteenth t…

Does anyone recruit grunt devs like that? That honestly sounds like what I'd prefer. I just want to come in, keep the lights on, and have enough mental energy for other stuff after work.

I could see a market for that guy, and he takes 10 jobs like that Reddit thread.

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

#210

Post by lisper »

brokencode wrote: post #149
lisper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

> Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better?

No. But that doesn't mean that Apple hasn't fallen prey to this phenomenon. It just means that they set the bar incredibly high to begin with.

My first Apple was an Apple II, and I have never been without an Apple product since then. I currently own three Apple phones and eight Apple laptops. But for me the overall usability and quality of Apple products has been in decline over the last decade or so. I still run Mavericks on many of my machines because it was the last version of MacOS that Just Worked.

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