Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

warp.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 613 posts

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

#241

Post by bluGill »

lliamander wrote: post #218
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…

> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. Playing the devil's advocate here, but shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors. The incentive problem…

> shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors.

Partially. Your position should be your technical expertise in things important to the company. There are a lot of technical skills you can learn that are not useful and so the time to learn them would be wasted at that company.

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

#242

Post by vlovich123 »

jldugger wrote: post #182
bern4444 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple continues to innovate in new product categories. Apple Watch AirPods M1 Chip Services (Apple TV+, Apple Pay, Music, Fitness, iCloud etc). I include iCloud for services likeHide My Email and Private Relay. They do this all while maintaining a consistent release cycle of upgraded versions of their hardware (new iphones, macs etc). Also, everything in the list above has been developed under Tim Cook which…

You realize that's his point right? Each of those is trying to be the Cool New Thing, and part of what distracts the company while it ships butterfly keyboards, touchbars without escape keys, AntennaGate, whatever plagued HomePod so much they quietly discontinued it. Polish and Attention To Detail is outsourced to execs, who are increasingly spread thin.

AirPods in their first year shipped more bluetooth headsets than the all bluetooth headsets from all other manufacturers combined ever (or something insane like that). AirPods by itself is a Fortune 500 company. Apple Watch is a Fortune 100. AirTags is a 1B revenue business.

Their scale is so immense that "flops" means "not a breakout success that resulted in a massive instantaneous increase to their bottom line". It also means the pressure is on them to have everything right (from the HW side) from the initial launch in terms of volume, build quality, reliability, & value add or they will have a meaningful setback to an expensive proposition (no room for exploring with smaller-scale things which is where competitors should start - Oura for example).

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

#243

Post by usrn »

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…

It's much more boring and you don't hear much about it but it's ultimately more pleasant to run things this way.

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

#244

Post by mindcrime »

titzer wrote: post #234
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…

> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured. I saw a lot of successful promo cas…

It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured.

Being "data focused" is probably a Good Thing in a very general sense, but there are real dangers that come with that. For example, there's a form of "data myopia" you can develop, which is best expressed by the old saw "data and optimization can help you get better at doing $SOMETHING, but don't tell you if you're doing the right $SOMETHING in the first place."

I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people introduce bullshit measures and game them.

And of course there's Goodhart's Law[1] which leads to situations where trying to be "data driven" actually makes things worse when people start trying to "game" the metrics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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

#245

Post by dudeman13 »

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…

>You're asking for title inflation

You're asking for feature bloat. If the only way of winning is getting new stuff done, new stuff will be done regardless of the benefit or cost to the company.

That does sound like Google alright, though.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

titzer wrote: post #226

I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager. Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain: Everyone needs to chill the f### out. The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too…

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by usrn »

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…

Women demand men that are better than their peers while men only demand women who are good on their own. The evolutionary pressure produces men who are competitive in this toxic way.

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

#248

Post by mcguire »

sytelus wrote: post #140
xoofoog wrote: post #82

Quoted post unavailable.

Since when solving "hard problems" became toxic masculinity? Are you saying Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace suffered from toxic masculinity? PS: I am not endorsing promo-culture where impact of users/revenue don't matter but I do believe solving hard problems should be rewarded (for example, Nobel Prize or Field Model) and making it "sexist" issue is unproductive .

Seeing your comment, I'm reminded of the Far Side comic where the dog only understands her name in the owner's speech: "blah blah blah Ginger blah blah".

"Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a gorilla-chest-thumping exercise. It's not enough to build things. You need to be better than those around you. But you have to be "googley" which means using logic and data to put down your coworkers and show why you're right and they're wrong."

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

#249

Post by toast0 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #35

> and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well. I can honestly say I didn't care about promotion while I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft (as a Software Engineer II). The quoted assertion makes me wonder if I was being naive or lazy. I truly believed that I didn't need to care about promotion because the work I…

The way I looked at it was: if I'm being paid enough, I care about being happy more than being paid more. Jumping through hoops to get promoted is going to get me more money and also make me do more stuff I don't want to do. I was happiest when I had a clear, important job to do, that everyone knew wasn't enough work for one person, and then the expectation that I'd spend the rest of the time fixing stuff that was nobody's job and freedom to set priorities for the most part (after all, if it was important, it should be somebody's job). Of course, at the last place, I think they have four engineers now doing my important job that left me mostly idle. Not sure how four people can work on it, but not my circus.

I briefly had one person reporting to me (well two people, in sequence), and navigating performance reviews on behalf of someone else is not for me.

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

#250

Post by bigcat123 »

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…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN