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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

#331

Post by edmundsauto »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #253
MivLives wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

> That's what every job in Silicon Valley is

I am curious - is this informed by your experience of having sampled every job in SV? Or perhaps a representative sample? Is it possible other people might be different than you and have a different perspective.

What a fucking joke of a comment.

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

#332

Post by scarface74 »

lliamander wrote: post #305
scarface74 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it doesn't impact the bottom line then business folks need to do a better job of capturing the value you could provide.

Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams.

It even came out during the Oracle trial that Google only made about $26 billion in profit from the inception of Android to 2016. Apple makes more from Google in mobile by being paid for it to be the default search engine ($12-$18 billion a year) than Google makes from Android.

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

#333

Post by vrc »

jedberg wrote: post #205
tuckerman wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well this was told to me by xooglers who were now working for other companies, so either they were the ones doing it and that's why they left, or they made it up to make Google sound worse. So I guess take it with a grain of salt?

12 years ago OKRs were huge. And yes, you graded them, managers and other teams viewed them, and you aimed for 0.7. Recently, it was a lot more lax. Many teams didn’t do them, drifted away from them, or didn’t bother grading them

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

#334

Post by H8crilA »

iamevn wrote: post #314
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 wor…

Definitely much more to this story, but they basically wanted you to do a part of their job for them. It's common and mostly understandable, as they might not remember everything that you did. They'll have to re-word everything anyhow.

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

#335

Post by elefanten »

pavlov wrote: post #301
GoatOfAplomb wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way. Here's a blog post explaining their approach: https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s... Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about for anyone bu…

“ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of those levels. We've always been completely remote”

I guess the main question that comes to mind is “why would a strong-performing, early-in-career engineer want to join?”

In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%?

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

#336

Post by lisper »

edmundsauto wrote: post #318
lisper wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this is exactly my point. Apple is optimizing the wrong things (for me) because it's trying to build Cool New Things rather than things that are actually useful. My NUC looks perfectly fine, and it sits under my desk so no one ever sees it anyway. It is superior to a Mac Mini in every conceivable way. It's smaller and it costs less for the same tech specs. The only thing that a NUC doesn't do that a Mini does is run MacOS legally.

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

#337

Post by ozzythecat »

> The main problem with promotion-oriented culture is that it’s very hard to align promotion-criteria with business objectives, and so engineers end up doing a lot of work that doesn’t necessarily most benefit the product, users, or business – or even potentially their own growth.

Welcome to Amazon! Just about everything in this article rings true at Amazon. In fact, I’d say Amazon is even worse.

I think L4 to L5 and L5 to L6 promotions have certainly gotten easier over the years, and promotions have actively been used as a retention tool, given all the other (dis)incentives that would convince talent to leave.

What I saw in Amazon retail and Alexa was a culture of:

1) refusing to work on valuable projects unless you could actively claim to be the lead

2) taking credit for others’ contributions, or deliberately throwing a teammate under the bus and saying X didn’t work because of some thing specific they proposed (even if you agreed with it at the time)

3) general culture of back stabbing and not helping your own teammates, especially out of concern that your teammate would reap the promo benefit over you

And at a higher level, L7 managers will attribute a failed project, mismanaged project, or other issues to a partner team. “Our team is blocked on this other team Y” - never mind the fact that all the contracts have been agreed upon and this L7s team never wrote a line of code.

By the time I left, Amazon had gotten horrendous with organizations trying to invent “frameworks” so A or B can be done in 1 click, and this became the way for Sr SDEs and Principals to get their promotion. They create complexity and deliver some half baked, constrained way of solving problem X. This lets you show “impact” across an entire organization, even if this new abstraction has made engineers’ lives a living hell.

This was a major reason I left Amazon. The company was running out of ideas, and instead of focusing on products and customers, the engineering culture was heavily focused on inventing complexity for the sake of promotion. 9 times out of 10, the son of a bitch creating this complexity would take his or her promo and then move to another org, a new greenfield project. Never sticking around to deal with the pain they’ve caused.

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

#338

Post by fatnoah »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #326
GoatOfAplomb wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)? Some L4s can make more than L6s. What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected. What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

>What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

At a company like Facebook, the difference between L4 and L6 is over $100k in salary, and $80k in stock (difference in 4 year refresh grant of $325k). $180k a year difference isn't almost nothing.

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

#339

Post by quadrifoliate »

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…

Apart from the look and feel, there are severe regressions with the operating system in a lot of places – external non-Apple hardware that would just work just fine on the existing OS stops working with a new OS version, etc. The quality of their OS has gone steadily downhill over the last few years.

At this point I would never do a macOS update unless I'm forced to do so for security purposes. I can't even begin to fathom why anyone installs the beta and does free QA for Apple.

I get the impression everyone at Cupertino works with only Apple Cinema displays and a lifetime supply of insanely priced Apple hardware; and no one bothers to test out compatibility with third-party devices at all.

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

#340

Post by LegitShady »

lisper wrote: post #125
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…

Another former Googler here (from waaaaaaayyyy back -- I was employee #104). The reason Google is the way it is, and many organizations are the way they are, is that they are trying to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success. Google initially succeeded by solving what was at the time a Really Hard Problem, and so the people at the top want to reproduce that by encouraging people to solve more Re…

google should work on some really hard problems they've ignored - customer service, privacy, etc.

It's why the only business I do with google now is in places where they essentially don't have competition, and only when I absolutely have to.

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