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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

#441

Post by ALittleLight »

lliamander wrote: post #358
ALittleLight wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Should you be penalized if the project fails?

No need to penalize if the project fails. It's an incentive to encourage people to work on high impact projects. Especially important where people have some freedom over which teams they are on. Doing menial work that provides clear value to the company should be recognized and rewarded.

If you aren't responsible for the project's failure, you're not responsible for the project's success, and rewarding, or punishing, someone for what they aren't responsible for is irrational.

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

#442

Post by yoz-y »

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.…

> What often happens when an employee doesnt get promoted?

They try again next cycle.

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

#443

Post by dang »

metadat wrote: post #375
lostcolony wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

As stated in TFA and throughout this thread, moving the burden to the ICs means they will be incentivized to focus on Promo Packet instead of real work. No offense intended, but in your comment it comes off a bit selfish and bears the hallmarks of a classic archetype of terrible manager. I'd never willingly work for you. Being in management isn't for everyone, it's a people-focused domain. The whole job is about supp…

Can you please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#444

Post by cweill »

goolulusaurs wrote: post #3

When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent to which they pervade practically every human institution.

I'm Poor Charlie's Almanac, Charlie Munger explains that cheating is a huge problem, and that if you create a game where people can cheat to get ahead, they almost inevitably will.

At Google you could cheat the promotion system. Just spend more time optimizing for promo than for improving products for your customers, and you would be handsomely rewarded. You end up with the cheaters becoming the leaders and the good engineers leaving in frustration when they need to take orders from cheaters.

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

#445

Post by joshuamorton »

dudeman13 wrote: post #372
joshuamorton wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is in fact the case that getting new stuff done is the only way to benefit the company. But new stuff != feature bloat. There's lots of new stuff that can be totally invisible to end users, and is deeply valuable. Treading water should not get you promoted. That doesn't make sense.

>it is in fact the case that getting new stuff done is the only way to benefit the company I spent a few weeks just refactoring 6k lines of code into +- 300 lines on my current job. If my company was run by you, the best course for me woould have been leaving that mess around. Which would have led to either the same refactoring under far more stressful time constraints, or even more shit code by applying a band-aid i…

> Also, there are loads of features that were far easier to implement after the refactoring.

Congratulations, you have demonstrated the value and made it easier to do something. As someone who has gotten promoted 2 times (and soon to be 3) primarily off of tech debt reduction and infrastructural improvements that don't themselves do anything, but drive future productivity, of course I think this is valuable. This kind of thing is literally the only work I do.

Now yes, there's a point beyond which only doing that work won't get you promoted, but that point is L5 where you're making 350K/year, and you can continue to do some of that work and get promoted further, you just likely have to

1. Get other people to also do that work 2. Do other work that acts at a larger scale

If you're actively adding new features to a service, you aren't doing maintenance. You're launching new things, and people get promoted by launching new things all the time. And people get promoted for making it easier to launch to features all the time.

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

#446

Post by Forge36 »

colonelxc wrote: post #18
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 "nobody dares giving bad feedback" thing isn't about retaliation (though I suppose that could happen). It's because perf is actually the worst place to provide "honest" feedback to a person about their performance. It's complaining to managers/directors instead of talking to the person themselves (the recipient wont get to read your feedback for a couple months after). Even if you want to talk to a manager about…

Oh. I think I understand my work culture now. Thank you.

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

#447

Post by dang »

xoofoog wrote: post #82

Quoted post unavailable.

Please keep ideological flamebait out of your comments here. The last thing we needed in this thread (ok, one of several last things we needed—but they're all tied for last place!) was yet another gender flamewar. You didn't need that to make your substantive point about competitiveness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262574 and marked it off topic.

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

#448

Post by iamevn »

H8crilA wrote: post #334
iamevn wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd understand if we were asked to pick what we felt was worth highlighting and provide some supporting data, but we effectively were doing the same amount of work on our own packets as before the shift. Just with a due date a couple weeks sooner so our manager could have time to edit.

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

#449

Post by astrange »

HWR_14 wrote: post #439
astrange wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well he also added one too many zeroes, but that's just a surface level problem.

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

#450

Post by Firmwarrior »

edmundsauto wrote: post #331
Firmwarrior wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you have to maintain things after they're made. New things are usually made out of multiple old things. Figuring out how stuff works, then fixing and reusing, supporting, or replacing it is the bulk of every programming job I've done or heard of.

I can't even conceive of what programming job wouldn't be describable as "grunt work" from the point of view of some hypothetical super-genius. Writing "new" code that just does the same thing as something you're tossing out, but with a different set of mistakes? Cutting-edge science work is mostly glue code between hardware and spreadsheets or databases. Cell phone firmware is mostly repurposing and updating the old firmware. Anything involving a GUI is going to be a massive time-sink getting the GUI to work the way the non-technical people using it want it to work.

How much time do you spend in any given year figuring out how to operate debuggers, find the right log files, narrow down some crash, etc?

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