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

271–280 of 613 posts

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

#271

Post by ShamelessC »

sokoloff wrote: post #62
baby wrote: post #2

The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…

The whole point of a tech company is to pay engineers $X and find a way for them to create some over-unity multiple of $X in value. If the problem is “this incentivizes engineers to make each other deliver more value”, that sounds like not a problem (and opens everyone up for increasing $X). It’s a problem when you start to see your fellow employees as the competition instead of your actual competitors being the comp…

It's a problem for people who value working on things that actually get used for more than a few years and aren't duplicate efforts to make some line on some graph go up somewhere.

These are of course people, after all. Not robots.

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

#272

Post by vkou »

tfp137 wrote: post #201
sytelus wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?"

1. You must be in an incredibly toxic enclave if managers in your org are routinely threatening people that way. It's certainly possible, it's a big company, there's been a number of shitty directors/execs that have made the news. But given points #2 and #3, I have reservations about believing generalizations about this particular claim.

2. ME is not a '3.0' (Unless you're measuring on a 12-point scale, that starts at 0.) There are three ratings above, and only one rating below ME - Needs Improvement. Which is a pretty serious wake-up call for the person and their manager.

3. Very few people get NI, you seem to be confusing Google with either old Microsoft, or Amazon, whose bell curves, as I understand, require(d) ~1/5th of the company to be on the shit list at any particular point in time.

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

#273

Post by cm2012 »

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.

Even every non physical competitive sport in the world is male dominated to an absurd degree. Chess, esports, poker, you name it. Hyper competitive environments are associated with masculinity for valid reasons.

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

#274

Post by ShamelessC »

bluGill wrote: post #90
UncleMeat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of services that could have just been a feature in an existing service) Ideally this gets people fired, not promoted. Google explicitly calls out "solutions to hard problems are easy to maintain" on its ladder, for example. People can fail to identify these cases, but the intention is to promote based…

Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem? Should someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug? I've seen real bugs that bounce around for months, each time to someone who looks decides it isn't in their code and points to someone else: eventually we tell one engineer to solve it…

Sorry but shouldn't you have just taken the initiative and fixed the bug yourself? This is the sort of thing I would hope a company would reward - not passing the buck.

If that's "below your pay grade" _and_ you're still capable of doing it, well that's kind of the problem then, isn't it.

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

#275

Post by lostcolony »

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…

Can't speak to Google, but I can say that having ICs write their own packets has been hugely enabling for me at other companies. It means their success isn't reliant solely on implicit visibility of their work by me (which in turn meant I either had to maintain visibility on everything to the nth degree, get everyone to give constant feedback on each other, or fail to recognize their successes). I still come in and help consolidate and tweak it (I ask for a brag sheet from them that fits the packet format), with a 1-on-1 or three to ensure any questions I have get answered, and that we're aligned on the message, but taking it off my plate was -huge-.

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

#276

Post by ertian »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #19
baby wrote: post #2

The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…

> The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. Raising up and increasing the productivity of your peers sounds like a good thing. I think I'm missing how this is a bad outcome due to a perverse incentive. Are you saying the value extrac…

> the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more important business goals?

It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy of a higher-level engineer.

Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers, improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can add significant value to the company...but they won't be rewarded for it, because the perf process considers those to be simple, the domain of lower-level employees.

What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company.

Of course, people with those planning and communication skills are really valuable to a company. But somebody also has to do the work. Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet. And a lot of effective engineers getting frustrated and quitting because they don't want to spend their days working on slide shows.

It feels to me like the people in charge of the perf process just tend to overemphasize their own strengths and skills. Kinda by definition, the people designing the system are going to be senior people who are interested in communication and process, so that's what they look for in others. If they were the kinds of people who were interested in identifying and solving particularly devious or consequential issues on their own (or as part of one of their peer's projects), they wouldn't be working on the promo process in the first place.

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

#277

Post by compiler-guy »

sg47 wrote: post #212
em-bee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i remember reading in some startup oriented text that founder driven values works up to about 50 people. once your company grows beyond that a culture shift is inevitable. i don't know what the answers are to manage that shift and avoid it going into the wrong direction.

Should avoid hiring people from big companies that are used to promotions every year.

No big company I know of, certainly no FAANG, anyone expecting to be promoted every year. Even every two years would be considered quite fast.

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

#278

Post by GoatOfAplomb »

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…

It would be great if promo wasnt such a big deal. But when I look at the comp for an L3 software engineer, and the comp for an L5 software engineer, I have a hard time seeing how you could make people pay less attention to promo.

I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

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

#279

Post by joshuamorton »

Manuel_D wrote: post #197
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…

At some companies, this is broadly what "SRE" vs "SWE" is meant to capture. But the issue is that roles aren't very fluid, plenty of times SWE ends up transitioning to a role more resembling an SRE after building a system and reorienting towards maintaining it.

God I hope not, SRE isn't a maintenance engineering role!

Improving the reliability of a system (SRE's ultimate responsibility) is deeply technically challenging work of its own, and one can encounter deeply challenging problems.

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

#280

Post by ShamelessC »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #173
toast0 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some (many?) companies have an 'up or out' requirement where each position has a time limit to get promoted, unless it's a 'terminal position' which is ok to stay at. When I was at Facebook, this was administered by using the next level review guidelines after you had a position for N months (depends on the position), and if you don't meet those expectations, putting you into the firing pipeline (PIP, etc). One of ma…

Only true for E3/4. After that you can stay forever. I know someone that’s been E5 for 12 years

I just want to say that I can't believe some of the smartest people in the world are willing to put up with all of this off-putting corporate bullshit. No disrespect.
Post reply on HN