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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

#311

Post by MisterBastahrd »

mirntyfirty wrote: post #33
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…

I think this is one of the key frustrations I have with modern software development, change for the sake of change. I feel as though many products degrade over time and as a user I’m generally quite hesitant to upgrade anything if I don’t have to.

It's a whole "growth" thing.

Like, it's not good enough to have a quality product that generates a sustainable revenue stream year after year. You have to "grow" because companies don't really do dividends anymore, they want a constant increase in stock prices, product be damned.

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

#312

Post by nharada »

> Post-hoc design documents written specifically to explain work to a promo-committee after the feature has been built

I actually wish these would get written all the time. Not because of a promo-committee, but because post-hoc documentation explaining how the system works after it's already been built (as opposed to a design doc from the planning stages that may or may not reflect the actual state of the built system) is really valuable.

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

#313

Post by ChrisCinelli »

Some HR rules are put in place to make the workplace appear more "equal" but it often ends up making advance people that are good a paper-pushing and BSing.

After enough years are passed with this system in place, the company is full with people that rarely care much about the users and care a lot about their status and paycheck. In these kind of cultures what tend to flourish is ego-boosting shining objects that rarely impact the users for good.

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

#314

Post by iamevn »

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…

Even after the shift, both managers I had requested very firmly that I write the initial draft of the packet. I left Google in September and my last day was a week after packet due date. I straight up refused to waste my time on a packet when I should be documenting any and everything that people might need after I left. My manager put tons of pressure on me and threatened me saying I was burning bridges and that word gets around.

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

#315

Post by analyst74 »

pillowkusis wrote: post #257
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…

I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of their turf, and Google.

The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence.

These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports.

Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.

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

#316

Post by alisonatwork »

alimov wrote: post #74
ZainRiz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is a bit more insidious than that As an engineer, you want to be working on cool new features too! Very few folks will be content sitting on their laurels just fixing the occasional bug or adding a touch more polish to a product that's already "done" If you setup a team to work that way, very soon you'll find that most of your engineers have left. Heck, the manager might get bored and leave too. "Okay, th…

Experienced something similar, but it was not an outage. Had several knowledgeable people leave the company, and they all happened to be experts in a particular service. Positions weren’t backfilled even though the people gave advance notice. About two months later we ended up getting out butts kicked when nobody knew the details of the service implementation and the service was expected to be updated to support some…

Arguably those folks who left didn't do quite as good a job as they perhaps should have when they were still there. A high quality developer leaving a service behind should have already written sufficient documentation so that another high quality developer (especially one at the same company) can ramp up more quickly than 3-4 weeks. I think this is just another symptom of many tech companies throwing up their hands and pretending like "legacy" services are inescapable technical debt, when really they just never bothered to emphasize to their employees that services should be built in a maintainable way from the outset.

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

#317

Post by es7 »

xoofoog wrote: post #82

Quoted post unavailable.

Ex-Googler here. The comment above is wrong and sexist.

Googleyness was always about bringing up the people around you and elevating your team’s potential, something that both women and men can excel at.

I have a lot of complaints about Google’s perf process, but I never saw toxic masculinity, competitiveness or putting down co-workers. On the teams I was part of, if any of that happened it would have been dealt with harshly and stopped immediately.

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

#318

Post by edmundsauto »

lisper wrote: post #303
mrtranscendence wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think this is a topic about which people can reasonably disagree :-) I'll just add that my complaint about inability to upgrade does not just apply to laptops. It's the whole product line (other than the Pro) including the Mini and the iMac. If I have an iMac and I need more RAM, I have to throw out a perfectly good SSD, processor, and display . There is just no excuse for that. I have a NUC that is essentially a h…

You are correct to say there is no excuse for the lack of upgradability, but not for the reasons you believe.

There is no excuse because “excuses” are not germane to making trade offs. Apple chose to not make devices easily upgradable because it enabled them to be amazing in other dimensions (sturdiness, manufacturing efficiency, design, aesthetics, plus most users don’t give a flying fuck about upgrading)

Why would you need an excuse for defining your own products your way?

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

#319

Post by _j5l3 »

GoatOfAplomb wrote: post #278
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.

> 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.

Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets.

6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.

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

#320

Post by panda88888 »

feintruled wrote: post #63
epaulson wrote: post #36

This is only sort-of related, but a while back there was a beautiful Twitter thread, I think about Google product managers or engineering leaders, who come into a product, revamp a bunch of features and come up with metrics to show that they were successful with it in the short term, and then use that as the case for their promotion and time it just right so they can disengage and bail over to the next product, just…

A co-worker of mine described this as 'surfing ahead of the wave of responsibility'

This is great. I am going to borrow it.
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