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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

#281

Post by lliamander »

bluGill wrote: post #241
lliamander wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

I think that's a fair point, but I'm not sure it changes things a lot for companies like Google.

The more a company relies on technical innovation to provide business value, the harder it is to predict what sort of things actually align with business value.

To put it simply - we don't know what hard problems need to be solved. Having a place where really smart people have the autonomy to work on whatever they want is the best way to find out. This is the classic argument for funding basic research in the sciences.

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

#282

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

ALittleLight wrote: post #230
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you missed their point: the toxicity is non-gendered. (I say you missed their point but they also kinda did a poor job of making it, FWIW.) There might be a point that Google's culture in practice is male-dominant but I think it's mistaken thinking that puts the toxicity on the male-dominance. Consider your words as if they were being said about a woman: > Proving you're smart by solving hard problems i…

It's hard to claim a phrase like "toxic masculinity" is non-gendered.

I'm claiming that toxicity is non-gendered.

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

#283

Post by lliamander »

onpensionsterm wrote: post #263
lliamander wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That turns the incentive away from creating shareholder value and towards hazing and navel gazing. There's also the issue of conflating the incentive/reward schemes with the need for roles to be performed. Being good at inverting binary trees won't make you a good manager but when the manager role carries money and prestige then it's the hammer you use to reward the shape rotators.

> That turns the incentive away from creating shareholder value and towards hazing and navel gazing.

It's navel gazing until it turns into the next big money maker.

> Being good at inverting binary trees won't make you a good manager but when the manager role carries money and prestige then it's the hammer you use to reward the shape rotators.

Nitpick, but I was focusing on the non-manager track.

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

#284

Post by benlivengood »

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.

My team (under ads SRE umbrella) usually did aim for ~0.8 with a 1.0 stretch goal of some sort. It was a fairly reasonable calibration to make sure we were scoping and planning OKRs accurately.

If every OKR got 1.0 it meant we could comfortably take on more work next half, below 0.8 and we would plan to do a little less next half.

In theory it would have been fine to score OKRs above 1.0 for stretch goals for the same effect, but the software didn't work that way.

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

#285

Post by adamsmith143 »

zeruch wrote: post #224
zarkov99 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

When it is prevalent (including in the irony of subsequent commentary), it shouldn't be surprising to see it called out, hyperbole notwithstanding.

Oh the irony

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

#286

Post by lumost »

judge2020 wrote: post #228
lumost wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple spent ~22B in R&D in 2021, but they definitely have large-scale decision makers expecting near-perfection on anything considered for released, probably before they even push it to DVT.

Resistance to change has an odd correlation with R&D spending. A company that refuses to change their products may spend more on R&D than one changing products all the time, as the cost of each change is much higher.

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

#287

Post by jrochkind1 »

svachalek wrote: post #76
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…

Yup. I left a decade ago with this exact thought. There are people there who lift mountains to create real working systems, but you're actively discouraged from doing that if you want any sort of career there. And spending two weeks a year on performance reviews just serves as a constant reminder of those values. It's easily visible from the outside too. The constant stream of one half-baked video chat solution or so…

I work in academic libraries. At the point Google Books and Google Scholar (two things that were relevant to my work) were being developed or very new, maybe 10 years ago now, I could actually talk to Google engineers about questions on how I could/should best integrate on my end, or problems or bugs (I did find some, that the google contacts agreed were). (It's true that cooperation from libraries/academic sector was something Google needed to succeed there too, to some extent).

Two years later... forget it. There was no way to get anyone's attention or a response about anything. This includes actual bugs and problems.

It was pretty clear to me then that there was nobody driving the bus on these projects anymore. There had been excited invested smart people around for the development, but once the thing seemed stable... there didn't seem to be anyone around at all anymore? I started to notice that this was how things worked at Google generally -- after a new product was deployed, there seemed to be simply nobody around anymore with the time and interest to act on bug reports, or talk to external partners, or just care at all. Without having at that time heard anything from inside the walls, that became my theory of how things worked at Google -- everything is abandonware.

So, yeah it's visible.

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

#288

Post by mrtranscendence »

lisper wrote: post #262
majormajor wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MacBook design has only changed step-by-step in small increments since the 2003 aluminum Powerbooks. The iPhone has pretty similarly used just a couple of basic designs since 2013. So I'd definitely say Apple is best in class at incremental changes with the exception of the touchbar/butterfly MBPs. I'd just disagree with you over the quality: my M1 MBP is a big improvement over even the pre-touchbar ones in basic…

I'll see your M1 and raise you a trash-can Mac Pro, and the fact that anything other than a Mac Pro can't be upgraded. But it's actually more about the software than the hardware. Once upon a time Macs were the computer that Just Worked. But recent devices, including phones, tablets, and laptops, have major usability issues. It's more about the software than the hardware, but with Apple you literally cannot separate…

I somewhat disagree?

To be honest, the current UI look-and-feel hasn't bothered me at all. I can't recall ever being confused by it (with one exception: iPad multitasking). Perhaps I've simply internalized it to such a degree that I accept it, warts and all, without thinking about it critically. But it's difficult for me to be too upset by a UI that really has "just worked" for me.

As long as my customized keyboard shortcuts still work, I'll be happy, I guess.

I also haven't experienced the software stability issues that you point out, though I have no doubt this is because I rarely do things like transfer data from one device to another (though when I have done so it's worked well enough). YMM(and does)V.

> I'll see your M1 and raise you a trash-can Mac Pro, and the fact that anything other than a Mac Pro can't be upgraded.

The trash can Mac Pro was a mistake, though at least it's one they eventually remedied. Their recent lineup has been almost universally praised, except for cost and (as you point out) upgradeability. I'm not too bent out of shape about upgradeability because I've never tried to upgrade a laptop, but I see the annoyance.

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

#289

Post by lliamander »

ctvo wrote: post #266
lliamander wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Bulverism on display. Don't defend your position, just assume you're right and offer an armchair pyscho-analysis for why people who disagree with you are wrong.

Here's some more Bulverism: What's there to defend? Colloquially toxic masculinity means exactly what the OP was going for. It's to jockey for power, position, and status at the expense of others (and often detrimental to their own goals). Hey! Women sometimes also display these toxic masculine traits commonly found in male primates! You should be more inclusive and call it toxic humanity! has to be one of the least…

I suspect, though I cannot prove, than than many of those comments are made at least somewhat ironically.

We've been perpetually informed than men and women are the same from the neck up for decades, and a Google employee (James Damore) was even fired for pointing out that men and women differ in their preferences, attitudes, and social behaviors.

That it is now OK to acknowledge those differences when it makes men look bad is quite the standard to set.

I mean, which is it? Are men and women the same or are they different (on average)?

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

#290

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Because coasting costs me mentally. I want more than that. I coasted for a year and it was disastrous to me, mentally.
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