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

251–260 of 613 posts

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

#251

Post by rileyphone »

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.

All across corporate America, there are devs who make 80-120k a year and keep it 9-5 (but really like 11-2). Especially with the recent turmoil in the market, you can find a very easy yet well paying (for normal people) job. Now if only HR would advertise the jobs this way...

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

#252

Post by mcguire »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #127
xoofoog wrote: post #82

Quoted post unavailable.

>a culture of toxic masculinity Hyper competitiveness. There is nothing "male" in nature about pushing people to compete in a giant free for all.

On the other hand, having spent many years at IBM, the Loudest Person In The Room is rarely a woman. And, having been part of a fair number of woman-led organizations, including those that were straight up empire building, hyper-competitiveness tends not to be a problem; they have other pathologies.

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

#253

Post by Firmwarrior »

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 don't know too much about Google, but I can talk about other companies. Everyone recruits grunt devs like that. That's what every job in Silicon Valley is. It's just that some companies and teams want you to spin it like you're some amazing lone wolf 100x genius while you're scraping dogshit off the bottom of the company's shoes.

A big part of it is that the executives decide what's making money for the company, and they'll focus on that. If you're scraping turds on the "rockstar" team in the "rockstar" org, you'll get showered with bonus money and RSUs. If you're scraping turds on a product that none of the VPs care about, you'll probably get screwed over. Some of the people in the non-"ninja"/"wizard"/"rockstar" orgs will do OK because they look like indispensable geniuses, and I think that's what a lot of this sentiment comes from.

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

#254

Post by scarface74 »

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…

Having technical expertise doesn’t mean much of anything if it doesn’t positively impact the bottom line.

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

#255

Post by onpensionsterm »

zarkov99 wrote: post #110
xoofoog wrote: post #82

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

If it was about masculinity itself being irredeemable, the adjective wouldn't be there. Surely a website of programming enthusiasts can figure out parsing?

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

#256

Post by bigcat123 »

leros wrote: post #162
jstanley wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was nowhere near enough big projects to get everyone the evidence they needed for promotions. Would the goal be to promote everyone ? Who's going to do the work they all used to do?

It's a retention issue. If people don't level up fast enough and get raises they'll leave for another company.

No post body was provided.

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

#257

Post by pillowkusis »

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 person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others.

This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager.

Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.

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

#258

Post by javier_e06 »

Those who stayed later Fridays and logged in to work on the weekends, those who rattled some cages and when yelled, yelled back, where promoted. The rest of us who enjoy our evenings with our families and married feasibility with sustainability got burned out and left for greener pastures. Good article.

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

#259

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

And this can and will go on until the $$ Billions from search/ads stop raining from the sky.
Post reply on HN