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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

#431

Post by shanusmagnus »

lostcolony wrote: post #403
metadat wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no single correct take, and I appreciate you filling in more of your perspective on the matter. I'd be curious to understand what exactly you feel my points were, and why you think differently. I can't help but feel like I must be missing something or misunderstanding your comment. Fortunately we're unlikely to ever collide in real life :). Again, I mean no disrespect. Genuinely would like to understand your…

Sure - >> moving the burden to the ICs means they will be incentivized to focus on Promo Packet instead of real work Such has not been the case. In fact, I've had to repeatedly remind people to add things to their promo packet. The point is that documenting successes as they happen means they get to own their own visibility; I've walked into multiple teams where people chafed at being passed over, because their past…

This has been my experience too, and is a frustration for managers that, in my experience, ICs don't understand: we _want_ to help you. But we've got a lot of shit to do. So we need evidence to draw from to rep you to the Powers That Be, both formally and informally. I always tried to have good ambient awareness of what my people were doing and how they were contributing, but that gets stretched thin. I am not omniscient, and cannot, and do not want to, micromanage your every action.

The best solution I found is the one you described: get people in the habit of incrementally building a case for how they contribute. Some people bought into this strategy and they benefited bc I became way more effective in advocating for them, not just at set times, but always. Some didn't, and they were constantly dis-satisfied with the company, and with me. I never was able to solve the issue for them before I resigned.

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

#432

Post by nunez »

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…

seven times if you include AirPods and the Apple Watch

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

#433

Post by irishcule »

digitalgangsta wrote: post #151

What often happens when an employee doesnt get promoted? they leave and usually are able to get that next level role in another company. Why is that?? Why does the current company require employees to show a track record and data points to be promoted, while they hire externally for the same position and often only look at resumes, interview and maybe an assessment. Why isnt it the same bar for internal vs external.…

I worked at a company with a process like that when I was an "Engineer" looking for a promotion to "Senior Engineer", at least for me it felt insulting that I had 3 years of performances reviews "exceeding expectations" and "already performing at the level of Senior Engineer" to then be told, ok now you have to do an interview and a presentation to say why you deserve to be promoted to Senior. I declined to go through the process and then left a few months later to become a Senior Engineer at a different company.

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

#434

Post by BlargMcLarg »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #412
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We would see more little old ladies out there who held out for above average How in the world can you come to this conclusion when society hasn't been in the situation where old ladies as a whole were in a position to be close to equal financially compared to their male peers in at least the last century? If anything, you have to wait a few more decades to come to this conclusion at minimum .

The original contention was that women held out for higher-status men, leading to selection pressure such that men evolved to be more competitive. If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work. Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men? You’d have an hypothesis like: among married 40-something women, the distribution of…

>If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work.

That's not what the above implied. You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer. Things only caught up in the last few decades or so. All those younger generation women still need to age into old ladies in the first place.

>Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men?

Financially? Yes. While I don't fully subscribe to the idea of "equal or better than", you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around, to the point men can use their money to compensate for deficiencies elsewhere[0]. That alone would explain why women haven't been nearly as competitive in the workplace as men: men have a far bigger incentive to do so on top of all the other incentives both experience.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

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

#435

Post by JJMcJ »

aix1 wrote: post #240
JJMcJ wrote: post #229

Is Google an up or out company? That is, if you don't get a promotion in a certain number of years, you will be encouraged to leave? That would encourage making projects more complex than they need to be, to get that promotion.

For software engineers, the expectation is to get to L4 eventually (new grads get hired at L3). I've not seen any concrete guidance on what "eventually" means in this context. This used to be L5 until a few years back.

So if they make one promotion, they are OK indefinitely?

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

#436

Post by cbsmith »

lliamander wrote: post #281
bluGill wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> 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.

This really isn't the classic argument for funding basic research.

All you're saying is that it's hard to know what will prove to be a useful tool, and that's really beside the point for figuring out what should be rewarded. Absolutely having a commanding understanding of a broad set of technical tools should be a career asset, but it should be a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

You don't need to know what hard problems need to be solved to address the original criticism here. You need to understand what problems the organization is currently focused on, and solve those problems with simplicity and efficiency, even if that doesn't allow someone to show off that they can solve the harder technical problems than anyone else. The reward systems in the company should reflect that, and if it does, I would expect that people who could solve the harder technical problems would be more likely to be rewarded than others, but their skills would be much more likely to be directed towards simplifying and improving the efficiency of the company's execution rather than having a bias towards the reverse.

Now, another important skill at more senior levels is being able to identify new problems deserve focus (i.e. figuring out what problems are useful to solve), so that should also be reflected in the company's reward systems as well, but that is still an orthogonal skill to "demonstrates they can solve the hardest problems".

Think of it like product managers: if you primarily reward your product managers for launching new features, pretty soon your company will be weighed down in operational overhead from trying to support a cornucopia of features, many of which aren't particularly well done, rather than having a streamlined operation that delivered products that excelled at delivering on the solution they most wanted.

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

#438

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #399
hotpotamus wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.

It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.

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

#439

Post by HWR_14 »

astrange wrote: post #426
Terry_Roll wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dont people work for themselves, you can earn alot lot more, like over 20x more!?!

You might be forgetting self-employment tax there?

He's talking about making 10 million a year and you think the issue is he forgot the 8k or so of self employment FICA taxes?

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

#440

Post by joshuamorton »

bluGill wrote: post #381
joshuamorton wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the problem can only be solved by management attention, and you cannot demonstrate to your management that the problem is impactful enough that it deserves their attention, either you are incapable of making a clear enough argument to focus on the right problem, or the problem isn't actually as dire as you think it is (or management is bad and wrong, or at the very least mismatches your values). Two of t…

Many outsiders have noted that googles incentive structure is not around customer happiness in general. Thus articles and discussions like this one.

You're mixing two problems.

Is the issue that Google, as a company, is not addressing user happiness enough? Or is the issue that some organization is letting bugs languish? The first is a much harder problem than the second. You don't need to solve the first to fix the second. I stand by my claim that it is feasible to address the first as an L5, that could reasonably get someone promo'd to 6, and you wouldn't need to involve anyone above a director to do it. Of course, doing so would involve writing very little code, because so much of this is procedural and political, so the engineer who just wants to be rewarded for fixing bugs wouldn't take the initiative to solve this problem. But alas.

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